No matter where you are along the journey of migration, VMware provides the solutions that help you migrate to the cloud with ease. VMware tools extend your on-premise cloud by leveraging your preferred public cloud partner. 

• VMware Cloud on AWS — Accelerate your cloud migration with consistent vSphere-based infrastructure delivered on AWS, the world’s leading public cloud. 
  
• Azure VMware Solution — Seamlessly extend or migrate your existing on-premises VMware environment to Azure VMware Solution. 
• Google Cloud VMware Engine — Use the tools, policies, and processes you know to rapidly extend into Google Cloud. 
• Oracle Cloud VMware Solution — Support a fully functional VMware environment in the secure, high-performance Oracle Cloud. 
• IBM Cloud for VMware Solutions — Simplify your path to the cloud, and go further once you're there. 
• VMWare Cloud Foundation — Access integrated cloud infrastructure and cloud management services to run enterprise applications in both private and public environments. 
• VMware HCX+ / VMware HCX — Leverage the managed workload migration and mobility solution to seamlessly migrate workloads between private data centers and public clouds.

Cloud migrations are not simple operations; however, online content often reduces the matter to a handful of straightforward tasks. Enterprises should thoroughly plan and consult with IT professionals who possess the relevant experience if they do not have the expertise themselves. The misleading belief that cloud operations are the same as on-premises operations is a misleading contributor to much oversimplification in how IT teams approach migrations. This can lead to mistakes and errors, ultimately setting back operations and inflating costs. 

For example, enterprises securing their on-premises infrastructure likely adhere to a fortress model, where firewalls, reverse proxies, DMZs, and more protect the company network. This style of security creates a single trust zone that exists within the perimeter of the network. However, because of the asymmetric nature of public clouds and hybrid clouds, this is not a sufficient security strategy.  

Contrastingly, public cloud networks do not share the same fortress model but must create a zero-trust security model that demands users and devices intelligently authenticate themselves before accessing resources. Beyond the traditional one-time login trust model, zero-trust models use contextual policies, continuous network monitoring, multifactor identification, identity access management (IAM), and advanced endpoint security to enforce an environment that continuously validates users in real time. 

The basic steps below outline the general concerns before, during, and after cloud migrations.  

1. Establish Goals — The ultimate aim of cloud migrations is business performance. Defining metrics to determine a successful cloud migration is necessary. 
2. Devise a Security Strategy — As illustrated above, security in the cloud requires an evolution in protective thinking. While the public cloud enables agility and scalability for enterprise operations, threat points in the public cloud have also multiplied. 
3. Data Migration — A reliable cloud partner can ease much apprehension and frustration, especially when safeguarding the integrity of your proprietary data. Partners should be able to replicate with fidelity the enterprise database and keep it up-to-date. 
4. Migrating Business Intelligence — Migrating applications intended for the cloud need interoperability consideration. Do your enterprise applications require refactoring or rewriting for the cloud environment? See the strategies below. 
5. Final Switch Over — Depending on the complexity of the cloud configuration, all in the public cloud or a hybrid configuration, enterprises may simply be able to switch off on-premises legacy systems. Others will need to ramp down legacy systems while introducing their cloud apps, while other on-premises systems may remain in use to handle sensitive company data. 

As noted previously, every enterprise takes its unique journey to the cloud. But, each journey has a beginning, middle, and end.  

Before Migration 

• Define your strategy — Take into account all stakeholders involved, migration strategy, partners, and business intent. 
• Plan your migration — Assess what apps, databases, and infrastructure your business truly needs; a migration can be a powerful opportunity to reassess the total cost of ownership (TCO) of your IT infrastructure.  

During Migration 

• Prepare the organization for migration — Even when recruiting cloud migration specialists' efforts, in-house IT personnel need to learn the skills to keep them abreast of cloud technologies and tools. 
• Adopt the cloud environment — Adoption in waves is an approach to cloud migration that uses automated tools to migrate appropriately sized workloads. Adopting in waves reduces IT and business risk and ensures the manageability of the migration process. 

After Migration 

• Secure and manage your workloads — Visibility is paramount in managing control and security; by using a single control to simplify management, enterprises can detect and respond to threats across their hybrid environs. 
• Govern and cost optimize your cloud environments — Companies move to cloud environments for their superior agility and scalability. These features allow enterprises to control their costs at a granular level when they need to ramp up or down resources in response to demand. 

VMware provides a step-by-step guide describing how to migrate projects to VMware Cloud on AWS for those embarking on their data migration journey. The guide will take you through migrating virtual machines from your on-premises data center to VMware Cloud on AWS.  
The migration process contains three stages: Plan, Build and Migrate. Each stage is divided into a series of steps that build on each other to guide you through a successful migration.

• Plan — A critical first step, in the planning stage you will determine the networking, security, and other resources required to support your enterprise demands, steps include: 
  • Get to know VMware Cloud on AWS
  • Create VMware Cloud on AWS account 
  • Analyze on-premises workloads 
  • Analyze network dependencies (optional) 
  • Size your workloads 
  • Prepare AWS resources 
  • Prepare network ranges 
  • Prepare DNS strategy 
  • Prepare for network connection 

• Build — Using the parameters that you determined in the Plan stage, you will create a cloud SDDC and configure it to run your workloads. 
  • Create SDDC 
  • Configure network 
  • Configure intra AWS connectivity 
  • Download HLM Gateway (Optional) 
  • Enable vRealize Log Insight Cloud (Optional) 

• Migrate — Configure HCX, create a tunnel to migrate workloads, and test your results. 
  • Planning for migration 
  • Installing and Testing HCX 
  • Migrate by wave