What we deliver
Twara Technologies plans and carries out migrations of applications, databases and file stores from on-premises data centres, colocation facilities or another cloud provider into a cloud environment that you own. The outcome is not just servers in a new place. It is a documented, secure estate with monitoring, backups and cost controls in place from the first day, and a clear record of why each workload was treated the way it was.
Typical scope
- Discovery of servers, virtual machines, databases, storage, network rules, certificates, scheduled jobs and third-party integrations.
- Dependency mapping, so that systems that talk to each other move together or in a safe order.
- A target architecture and landing zone: accounts or subscriptions, identity, networking, logging, budgets and baseline security policies.
- Database migration, including schema conversion where an engine is changing, and validation that data arrived complete and consistent.
- Application changes needed for the new environment, such as configuration, connection strings and storage paths.
- Cut-over planning, communication with users and post-migration stabilisation.
Choosing a strategy for each workload
AWS describes seven migration strategies, the “7 Rs”: retire, retain, rehost, relocate, repurchase, replatform, and refactor or re-architect. The same thinking applies whichever provider you choose, and we use it to frame a decision for every application.
| Strategy | When it tends to fit |
|---|---|
| Retire | The application has little or no remaining use and can be archived and switched off. |
| Retain | Compliance, hardware dependencies or recent investment mean it should stay put for now. |
| Rehost | You need to leave a data centre quickly and the application works acceptably as it is. |
| Relocate | A virtualised estate can move to a cloud-hosted version of the same platform. |
| Repurchase | A commercial or SaaS product now does the job better than the custom or licensed system. |
| Replatform | Targeted changes, such as moving to a managed database, give clear gains without a rewrite. |
| Refactor | The application is central to the business and must scale or change faster than its design allows. |
The same AWS guidance notes that refactoring is the most complex and costly of the strategies, and for large migrations recommends moving first and modernising afterwards. We generally agree: change one thing at a time unless there is a good reason not to.
Technologies we work with
- Cloud platforms: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. We help you choose based on the services your workloads need, data residency, existing licences and your team’s skills.
- Provider migration tooling: each major provider offers its own server replication and database migration services. These are usually the right first choice for moves into that provider.
- Infrastructure as code: Terraform or OpenTofu when you want one approach across providers; AWS CloudFormation or Azure Bicep when you are committed to a single provider and prefer native tooling.
- Data transfer: native database replication for minimal-downtime moves, dump-and-restore for smaller databases, and online transfer or physical transfer appliances for large file volumes.
- Containers: Docker images, with Kubernetes or a simpler managed container service, when replatforming makes packaging the application worthwhile.
How we approach it
- Assess. Gather inventories, usage data, costs and constraints, and interview the people who run and use each system.
- Plan. Assign a strategy per workload, estimate one-off and running costs, and group applications into waves.
- Build the landing zone. Set up the foundation as code and review it with your security and operations stakeholders.
- Pilot. Move a lower-risk workload first to prove tooling, runbooks and communication.
- Migrate in waves. For each wave: synchronise data, test, rehearse, cut over at an agreed time and hold the rollback route open until sign-off.
- Optimise and decommission. Right-size based on real usage, confirm backups and alerts, then retire the source systems.
Quality and security
- Data validation after every transfer, using record counts, checksums and application-level checks agreed with the business owner.
- Least-privilege access, multi-factor authentication and separate environments for production and non-production.
- Encryption in transit and at rest, with secrets moved into a managed secrets service rather than copied into configuration files.
- Cloud security is shared. In its shared responsibility model, AWS explains that it secures the underlying infrastructure while customers remain responsible for items such as guest operating systems, data, encryption choices and access permissions. We make sure your side of that line has a named owner after migration.
- Every infrastructure change goes through version control and review, giving a record of who changed what.
Engagement options
- Migration assessment: a fixed-scope piece of work that produces the inventory, strategies, wave plan and cost estimates, which you can execute with us or with your own team.
- End-to-end migration: Twara Technologies plans, builds and executes the migration, working alongside your staff and handing over runbooks at the end.
- Migration with ongoing operations: migration followed by managed cloud operations so that monitoring, patching and cost reviews continue without a gap.
Contact us to talk through the systems you are planning to move.