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Just like moving house involves a lot more than simply putting boxes into trucks, migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) is more than simply a technical exercise. Big moves take careful preparation and planning so everything functions smoothly as you settle into a new location.
How can businesses create a case for AWS migration, structure the shift and execute it with minimal disruption and the best possible outcomes? Dinesh Sharma, Datacom Regional Practice Lead, AWS – who not only holds an AWS Golden Jacket, but also won the 2025 Reseller News Innovation Award for technical excellence – explains that the secret to success is to use the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to create a customised framework.
“Without any framework or structure to a migration, it’s a firefight,” Sharma says. “You’re just trying to solve problems as they come to you. It’s true that for a small migration, a one-off for a single application or to fight a burning issue, you might not need a framework. But for migrations larger in scale, more planning is needed. You’ve got to understand how applications talk to each other and move them in self-sufficient waves. That’s why MAP is really key when trying to migrate massive environments.”
The migration assessment framework establishes an organisation’s starting point, spots gaps and aims to anticipate issues before they crop up. There are three steps to the assessment:
The process includes evaluating readiness across six key dimensions – business, people, process, platform, operations and security – so every facet of the organisation can be readied for the migration.
“Every stage is important on its own,” says Sharma, who has worked on AWS migration for government agencies, major banks and other private organisations. “Assessing helps prepare the business case, which means we can help the business to unlock the next stages and funding. Mobilising readies the ground for the migration. It starts with investigation, and it includes preparing customers with training, and doing 7R analysis. The migrate phase is the actual switchover, and it tends to move faster, although that depends on how much we are migrating.”
A migration framework creates a roadmap for success, built on a reliable formula but tailored to each organisation.
“Every customer is unique, even if the underlying framework remains the same,” Sharma says. “The way you design a migration can be different from customer to customer. The base framework is always the MAP: assess, mobilise, migrate. Within those stages, the details will vary depending on the customer.”
An AWS migration should deliver measurable business outcomes, and the process of creating a framework involves defining success metrics. These might include improved uptime, faster recovery or lower infrastructure costs. By aligning the migration framework with your organisation’s timelines and risk appetite, and adding guardrails, switching to AWS can deliver a multitude of benefits.
“AWS migration integrates your environment and lets you leverage the latest and greatest services,” says Sharma. “That modernisation of applications, along with adding AI capability on top, is the main benefit.”
A framework also makes AWS migration as cost-effective as possible, often identifying end-of-life applications to retire, and operations that can be automatically powered down outside business hours. Overall, this may result in lower ongoing costs, depending on the customer’s specific situation.
This is increasingly important in light of Datacom’s 2025 Cloud & Infrastructure Report, which found that only around half of organisations in New Zealand, and fewer than half in Australia, are seeing the benefits they expected from cloud investments. Datacom’s experts point to poor ongoing management of cloud environments as a key root cause. Having a clear framework in place is one of the most practical ways to address this, ensuring cloud environments are actively governed, optimised and aligned to business outcomes over time.
AWS frameworks are global, but they need local context to really succeed. Both Australia and New Zealand have their own regulatory environments and unique market dynamics. Collaborating with a partner like Datacom delivers AWS expertise through a local lens.
“We’ve got a lot of experience because we’ve done this so many times,” Sharma says. “If you try to do a migration on your own, it’s likely you’re doing it for the first time, and that is highly risky. You don’t want to risk migrating your production applications on your own without the expertise.”
Because Datacom works closely with AWS, the team has deep knowledge of its products and services and can access partner benefits for customers.
“We help customers understand their starting point better – the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ – by asking the right questions. We know how to get the key stakeholders in the room, so we get clarity on main topics and sub-subjects.”
It’s this kind of exploration and variety that makes Sharma love his job: “I love the unknown. Every migration is different, every customer is different. The best part of working in this industry is that every day is a new day. You build your skills out, and you’re challenging yourself on a daily basis. I really like the challenge of that.”
Datacom and AWS help organisations migrate, modernise and manage workloads in the cloud. Datacom is Australasia’s largest homegrown tech company and the first AWS MSP in Asia Pacific (2015), with close to 20 locations and deep local market understanding. Using AWS MAP, security, AWS Marketplace and managed services, Datacom migrates workloads, modernises apps and builds secure, scalable cloud environments, delivering agility, cost efficiency and resilient outcomes. With trusted local delivery and decades of industry expertise across Australia and New Zealand, Datacom guides customers through cloud governance, security and optimisation, ensuring value from AWS.
