Many organizations are looking to the public cloud to solve on-premises infrastructure challenges. These range from capacity constraints, aging hardware, or reliability issues; or alternatively, organizations may be looking to capitalize on the value that cloud infrastructure can bring - saving money through automatic scaling, or deriving business value from large scale, cloud-native approaches to data processing and analytics.

However, moving to the cloud can be a complex and time-consuming journey. An inefficient migration program can significantly reduce the benefits realized from the migration, and a pure lift-and-shift approach can leave you with similar challenges and costs in the cloud as you were trying to escape from on-premises.

In this whitepaper, we outline Google’s approach to building a Migration Factory - an organization structure and set of processes that enable a fast, efficient migration to the cloud. We don’t presume that this is a team of Googlers coming to deliver your migration. We recommend building a blended team of people with the right skills and understanding of your organization, with clearly defined goals that are closely measured through the life of the program.