Establishing a Survey and Evaluation Team

An efficient survey and evaluation team is critical to enterprise cloud migration. The team is responsible for conducting detailed surveys; evaluating the existing IT infrastructure, service requirements, and cloud migration benefits of companies; and ensuring the effectiveness and feasibility of cloud migration strategies. The survey and evaluation team consists of members from different departments. A company can refer to the preceding CCoE organizational structure and role responsibilities to set up a well-rounded professional team. Necessary team members include:

• Survey and evaluation engineers: assigned by the IT director. They are from the IT department. They are responsible for surveying and evaluating the existing IT infrastructure, service systems, application architecture, data storage, and security policies, including the hardware configuration, network architecture, software version, and dependency. They should also analyze the compatibility between these facilities and cloud services, the migration difficulty level, the feasibility of migrating the existing systems to the cloud platform.
• Service experts: assigned by service directors. They are from service departments. They are responsible for collecting and analyzing service requirements, interviewing stakeholders, understanding the requirements and expectations of different departments, analyzing service value, providing teams with guidance and suggestions from the service perspective, and helping to quantify the benefits of cloud migration.
• Application architects: assigned by the service director. They are from the application team of the service department. They help the cloud implementation team survey the status of the service systems. They provide the survey and evaluation team with the resource status, application architecture, deployment architecture, dependencies, and more information.
• Financial experts: assigned by the finance director. They are from the finance department. They are responsible for accounting and analyzing the costs of cloud migration projects, including cloud service fees, migration fees, and O&M fees; and evaluating the economic benefits and return on investment (ROI) of cloud migration projects. These can provide financial information support and suggestions for cloud migration decision-making.
• Cloud security experts: assigned by the IT director. They are from the security team of the IT department. They are responsible for evaluating the security, compliance, and data protection capabilities of cloud services; identifying and handling potential security risks, and ensuring compliance with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards during cloud migration.
• Project manager: a member of the Project Management Office (PMO). This role manages the survey project progress, ensures in-time task completion, coordinates communication and collaboration between departments, promotes information flow, and resolves problems in the project in a timely manner.
• Cloud architects: A cloud expert from the IT department or cloud vendor. This role provides technical support and guidance for cloud migration, including migration methodologies and the best practices of a survey.

The way the survey and evaluation team works differs by scenario. If a company leads its cloud migration, the survey should be led by the preceding roles in the company, and the cloud vendor should provide necessary technical support. If a company purchases third-party professional services and the third party leads the cloud migration, the third party should lead the survey, and the company's team should provide related service and technical information.