Cloud Migration to AWS

A simple migration (1–3 workloads, minimal dependencies) typically takes 2–6 weeks. A mid-complexity migration (5–15 workloads, shared databases, compliance requirements) typically takes 2–4 months. A full environment migration (50+ workloads, multiple databases, regulatory compliance) typically takes 4–9 months. Forged Concepts structures migrations in waves so that business-critical systems migrate last and always have a tested rollback plan.

An AWS landing zone is the multi-account foundation for your AWS environment a management account, separate accounts for production, staging, and development, VPC networking in each account, centralized CloudTrail logging, Security Hub, and the IAM and SCP guardrails that enforce the security baseline across all accounts. AWS Control Tower automates landing zone setup. Forged Concepts configures the landing zone as the first step of every migration it's the foundation that everything else builds on.

AWS Transit Gateway is a network hub that connects multiple VPCs and on-premise networks through a single gateway instead of creating a mesh of VPC peering connections (which doesn't scale), you connect each VPC to the Transit Gateway and routing is managed centrally. With N VPCs, peering requires N×(N-1)/2 connections; Transit Gateway requires N connections. Forged Concepts uses Transit Gateway for all multi-account environments with shared services (databases, CI/CD, monitoring) that need cross-VPC access.

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the maximum time your business can tolerate being without a system after a failure "we need to be back up within 4 hours." RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum data loss your business can tolerate "we can lose at most 15 minutes of transaction data." AWS migration planning includes defining RTO and RPO targets for each workload, then selecting the backup and DR strategy that meets them Multi-AZ for low RTO, cross-region replication for near-zero RPO.

Yes. Forged Concepts has migrated workloads from Azure and GCP to AWS. The process is similar to an on-premise migration: discovery, landing zone setup, networking (VPN or Direct Connect), phased migration, and post-migration optimization. Azure-to-AWS migrations often involve converting Azure-specific services (Azure Blob → S3, Azure SQL → RDS, Azure Functions → Lambda) to their AWS equivalents.

A phased migration moves workloads to AWS in waves rather than all at once. Each wave: one or more workloads are migrated, tested in AWS, and validated under production traffic before the next wave begins. Critical systems migrate last, after the team has built confidence through smaller migrations. Each wave has a documented rollback plan so that if anything goes wrong, traffic can be routed back to the original environment within minutes.

Yes. Forged Concepts uses AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for database migrations DMS replicates the source database continuously while your migration runs, minimizing downtime to a final cutover window of minutes rather than hours. For large databases (1TB+), DMS is paired with AWS Snowball Edge for the initial bulk transfer.

AWS Direct Connect is a dedicated network connection between your on-premise data center and AWS bypassing the public internet. It provides consistent bandwidth, lower latency, and lower egress costs compared to VPN connections. Direct Connect is recommended for large data transfers during migration (to avoid egress costs), for latency-sensitive hybrid architectures, and for environments where public internet connectivity is not acceptable for compliance reasons.

Post-migration, Forged Concepts establishes the day-one operations foundation: CloudWatch dashboards and alerting, runbooks for critical services, DR configuration and backup validation, cost tagging and budget alerts, and a 30-day monitoring period with active support. Clients can then transition to a managed services engagement for ongoing operations or take full ownership of the environment.