Assess

You cannot improve what you do not understand. Before any cloud strategy, migration plan, or optimisation initiative can begin, you need an accurate, complete picture of your current environment — your infrastructure, your applications, your data flows, your costs, and your risk exposure.

The Survey phase is where we build that picture. It is a structured discovery exercise that gives your organisation the foundation for every decision that follows.

Infrastructure Discovery

We conduct a comprehensive inventory of your existing environment — on-premises, co-location, and any existing cloud footprint. Every server, database, network device, storage system, and application is catalogued with its configuration, performance baseline, utilisation patterns, and interdependencies. Nothing is assumed. Everything is documented.

This is not a spreadsheet exercise. We use automated discovery tooling to capture data at a level of depth and accuracy that manual processes cannot achieve — identifying the hidden dependencies and undocumented integrations that are the most common cause of migration surprises.

Application Portfolio Analysis

Infrastructure is the container. Applications are what actually matter to the business. We map every application in your portfolio — its business function, its owner, its technical stack, its user base, and its criticality. Each application is assessed against a clear framework that determines the right treatment: migrate, modernise, consolidate, or retire.

Applications that look straightforward on the surface often carry hidden complexity — legacy licensing tied to physical hardware, undocumented integrations with other systems, data residency requirements, or performance dependencies that only emerge under load. We find these during Survey, not during cutover.

Dependency Mapping

Modern environments are deeply interconnected. An application that appears to be a single system is often a web of services, APIs, databases, scheduled jobs, and external integrations that must all move together — or in a carefully sequenced order. We build a complete dependency map that makes these relationships explicit, so migration waves are sequenced in the right order and nothing is left behind.

Cost and Licensing Audit

We analyse your current infrastructure spend — hardware refresh cycles, data centre costs, software licensing, support contracts, and staffing — against projected cloud costs. This produces a Total Cost of Ownership comparison that gives your finance and executive stakeholders the numbers they need to make an informed decision, and identifies any licensing that requires special handling before migration begins.

Risk and Compliance Assessment

Every organisation carries a different risk profile. We assess your current compliance posture against the frameworks that apply to your industry — whether that is PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, or sector-specific regulations. We identify the gaps between your current state and your target compliance posture on AWS, so remediation is planned from the start rather than discovered during an audit.

Stakeholder Interviews

Technology assessments only tell part of the story. We conduct structured interviews with application owners, infrastructure teams, security, finance, and business stakeholders to capture the context that does not appear in configuration data — the applications that must not go down, the integrations that nobody documented, the team constraints that affect sequencing, and the business outcomes that define what success looks like.

What You Get

The output of the Survey phase is a comprehensive current-state report covering your full infrastructure inventory, application portfolio with recommended migration strategies, dependency maps, TCO analysis, compliance gap assessment, and a prioritised list of considerations that will shape the phases ahead. It is the single source of truth that every subsequent decision is made against.

Organisations that skip proper discovery pay for it later — in failed migrations, unexpected costs, security incidents, and months of reactive firefighting. The Survey phase is an investment in accuracy. It is the difference between a migration plan built on evidence and one built on assumptions.