Transition

With a clear picture of your current state and a prepared AWS environment, the work of moving and modernising your workloads begins. The Implement phase is the execution of your migration and transformation roadmap — structured, sequenced, and delivered in a way that maintains continuity for the business throughout.

This is where the planning becomes reality.

Migration Wave Planning

Not all workloads move at the same time or in the same way. We structure migration into waves — logical groupings of applications that can be moved together based on their dependencies, complexity, and business impact. Early waves are deliberately scoped to build confidence, validate the process, and surface any environmental issues before higher-risk workloads move.

Each wave has a defined scope, a sequenced execution plan, documented rollback procedures, and clear success criteria. Nothing is declared done until validation confirms that the workload is performing correctly in its new environment.

Rehost — Accelerated Migration

For applications that need to move quickly and where the primary objective is getting off ageing infrastructure, rehosting delivers the fastest path to AWS. Servers are migrated using AWS Application Migration Service, maintaining application behaviour while moving the underlying infrastructure to managed, scalable AWS compute. This is the right strategy for reducing data centre footprint fast and deferring architectural decisions to a later phase.

Replatform — Targeted Improvement

Replatforming makes targeted changes that extract meaningful value from AWS managed services without a full rearchitecture. A self-managed database becomes Amazon RDS — removing patching, backup management, and high-availability configuration from your operational burden. A self-managed message queue becomes Amazon SQS. Application servers are placed behind Elastic Load Balancing with Auto Scaling configured for variable demand. The application logic stays largely unchanged; the operational overhead drops significantly.

Refactor — Cloud-Native Transformation

Some applications are better rebuilt than migrated. Where business requirements demand higher availability, lower latency, reduced operational cost, or greater developer velocity than the current architecture can deliver, we redesign for cloud-native patterns. Monolithic applications are decomposed into services. Batch processes are replaced with event-driven architectures. Stateful components are replaced with managed, stateless equivalents. This is the highest-effort pathway and delivers the highest long-term return.

Data Migration

Data migration carries the highest risk and requires the most careful planning. We use AWS Database Migration Service for relational database migrations, with schema conversion handled by the AWS Schema Conversion Tool where the source and target databases differ. Data integrity is validated before, during, and after migration. Cutover windows are minimised through continuous replication that keeps source and target in sync until the moment of switchover.

Cutover and Go-Live

Each workload go-live follows a rehearsed cutover runbook. DNS changes, load balancer updates, and traffic routing adjustments are executed in a defined sequence with verification checkpoints at each step. Rollback procedures are documented and tested before the cutover window opens. Post-go-live monitoring is heightened for an agreed stabilisation period before the workload is handed to steady-state operations.

CI/CD and Automation Rollout

Alongside workload migration, we implement the delivery pipelines and infrastructure-as-code frameworks that will govern ongoing development and change. Every migrated workload is onboarded to the deployment pipeline, its infrastructure is codified, and its deployment process is automated from the point of implementation — not as a future initiative.

What You Get

At the conclusion of the Implement phase, your workloads are running on AWS, deployed through automated pipelines, monitored for performance and availability, and operating within the security and governance framework established during Harmonise. Each workload comes with documented runbooks, validated disaster recovery procedures, and a confirmed operational handover.

Implementation is where plans meet reality. A structured, wave-based approach with validated cutover procedures and clear rollback options is the difference between a migration that builds confidence across the organisation and one that creates months of stabilisation work after the fact.