Automated environment migration to the cloud

The Public Cloud has enabled the provisioning & management of an organisations IT infrastructure to be handled by a third-party, otherwise referred to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This offers the potential to create cost effective & scalable IT solutions. However, little work has been done on the processes involved in cloud migration of existing infrastructure. Specifically, there has been no framework or solution implemented in a case study setting to detail the processes necessary to perform a migration of existing infrastructure to the public cloud. This paper presents the architecture of an Environment Migration Framework (EMF), the purpose of which is to automate the migration of existing IT infrastructure to the IaaS platform. To prove the viability of this framework, an ongoing case study is described where the Environment Migration Framework is being implemented in an organisation seeking to migrate their existing virtual machine environments to the public cloud. The final sections of this paper detail the results obtained so far from the ongoing project and the future work.