A cloud migration scoped without a workload analysis moves the existing performance and licensing problems somewhere more expensive to run them. A cloud readiness assessment establishes which databases should move, which should be rebuilt first, which should stay where they are, and what each route costs, before a migration plan is committed to.
Read-only. Vendor-neutral, and not tied to one cloud.
Why it matters
Right-sizing belongs before the commitment, not in the invoice that follows it.
Idle and overprovisioned database resources are the largest avoidable line in a cloud bill, and the sizing decision that creates them is taken during migration planning. Correcting it afterwards is a second project with a business case of its own.
It has a licensing model, a performance profile, an availability requirement, and a data gravity problem that a virtual machine does not. Each of those changes the answer about where it should run, and a general cloud assessment asks none of them.
A migration scoped without a workload analysis carries the existing performance and licensing problems into a place that costs more to run them in, and the overrun is usually blamed on the cloud rather than on the scoping.
A cloud readiness assessment is a consulting engagement that analyzes a current data architecture, classifies each workload by how it actually behaves, and produces a prioritized roadmap for modernizing and migrating databases to cloud. Fortified Data assesses the data estate specifically rather than the wider IT estate, and delivers migration sequencing, risk assessment, and a total cost of ownership comparison that a finance function can act on.
General cloud assessments treat databases as one line item in an infrastructure inventory. That is where the cost overruns come from. A database has a licensing model, a performance profile, an availability requirement, and a data gravity problem that a virtual machine does not, and each of those changes the answer about where it should run.
The assessment is tailored to the business, technical, and operational requirements you already have. Whether the estate is entirely on premises, in a private cloud, or partly migrated already, the output is the same: a decision per workload, in a sequence, with a cost attached.
Five components, run in one engagement. Each one narrows the set of viable answers for the next.
A full audit of the existing estate, including on-premises systems, current cloud deployments, and private cloud. Data volumes, performance benchmarks, licensing structures, and total operational cost are recorded as a baseline for the transformation plan.
Every workload classified as transactional, analytical, batch, or real-time, with its own performance, availability, and scalability requirements established. This is what drives cloud service selection, and it is covered in detail below.
The complexity of each migration path evaluated: which databases suit a lift and shift, which need re-architecture, what the data transfer strategy is, what downtime window each move requires, and what order the moves should happen in.
Current licensing, hardware, and staffing costs compared against provider offerings, including managed services, scaling options, and licensing bundles such as Azure Hybrid Benefit, to give a realistic total cost of ownership rather than a list price comparison.
The cloud-native capabilities worth moving for, including auto-scaling, global replication, and advanced analytics, identified per workload so the business case rests on gains rather than on parity.
One roadmap document, written to be read by IT leadership and by finance without translation between the two.
Modernization and migration recommendations ranked by value and risk, so the sequence starts with the workloads where moving pays and defers the ones where it does not.
An estimate for each stage of the migration, including the dependencies that decide what has to finish before the next stage can start.
The specific failure modes for this estate, with mitigation for each, rather than a generic migration risk register.
Projected return and total cost of ownership set against the current cost of running the estate, in the form an executive decision actually needs.
Target architecture aligned to the workloads that were characterized, including which cloud services each workload should land on and why.
Not a general IT consultancy. Every assessment is built around the data platforms in scope, whether that is SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or a cloud-native service, in AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud.
Migration and optimization plans are built from the workloads that were measured, not from generic best practice. Two databases on the same server routinely get different recommendations.
Deliverables are written for finance and for IT leadership, with return projections and risk mitigation stated in terms a budget conversation can use.
The assessment goes past technical specification to cover governance, compliance, and security implications of each target architecture, scoped to the industry the data sits in.
Where the roadmap points at work you would rather not staff internally, Fortified Data can support execution through consulting engagements or ongoing managed services. The assessment does not depend on that, and the report is written so remediating internally stays a real option.
Fortified Data resells no cloud platform and takes no provider margin, so the recommendation is the one the workload analysis supports, including where that means a workload stays on premises.
The component the rest depends on
Databases are not migrated as an estate. Each workload is classified by how it actually behaves, and the classification decides which cloud service it should land on, how it gets there, and what it will cost once it arrives. Two databases on the same server routinely end up with different recommendations.
Consistent write throughput, low latency tolerance, and a hard availability requirement. The service choice turns on committed performance and failover behavior rather than on headline price, and these are usually the workloads that justify a managed instance.
Large scans, unpredictable concurrency, and a load profile that peaks around reporting cycles. Elastic or distributed services earn their cost here, and this is where separating compute from storage changes the economics most.
Heavy for a defined window and idle the rest of the time. Reserved capacity sized for the peak is the expensive mistake; scale-to-zero and scheduled provisioning are what make these workloads cheaper in cloud than on premises.
Streaming ingestion and continuous read pressure, where the constraint is I/O and regional latency rather than raw compute. Placement and replication strategy matter more than instance size.
The target service for each workload, whether it suits a lift and shift or needs re-architecture first, the data transfer strategy and the downtime window it implies, and the order the moves should run in so dependencies are not broken mid-program.
Sizing a cloud service from current server specification carries over whatever over-provisioning already exists, at a price that now recurs monthly. Characterization prices the workload rather than the hardware somebody bought for it three refresh cycles ago.
A general cloud assessment inventories infrastructure and treats a database as another server. A Fortified Data cloud readiness assessment analyzes the data estate specifically: licensing models, workload behavior, availability requirements, and the cost of moving data. Those are the factors that decide whether a database migration saves money or costs more, and they do not appear in an infrastructure-level review.
Only where the workload analysis supports it. Fortified Data resells no cloud platform and takes no provider margin, so the target platform is chosen per workload against performance, availability, licensing, and cost. An assessment frequently recommends keeping some workloads on premises, and says so in the report.
The assessment answers that for your estate rather than in general, but the recurring cases are workloads with constant high utilization where reserved on-premises capacity is cheaper, workloads whose licensing terms make a cloud core count expensive, workloads with data gravity that makes egress the dominant cost, and workloads under a compliance or latency constraint that a specific region cannot meet.
The cloud readiness assessment produces the plan. Fortified Data delivers the migration as a separate consulting engagement, so the assessment stays independent of the work it recommends. Organizations regularly use the roadmap to run the migration with their own team, and the report is written so that route is workable.
The cost-benefit analysis covers licensing bundles and eligibility, including Azure Hybrid Benefit, because licensing changes the cost comparison for most SQL Server estates. Editions, core counts, virtualization, and audit exposure are all read as part of that comparison, so a renewal that is about to be signed on the wrong assumption shows up before the migration is planned.
Yes, and it is one of the more common reasons organizations run it. A first migration done as a lift and shift usually leaves workloads running on services that were never matched to their behavior. The same workload characterization identifies which of them should be re-platformed, resized, or moved to a managed or serverless service, and what each change is worth.
The assessment stands on its own. If the roadmap points at work you would rather not staff internally, these are the routes.
We run your environment, with 24/7 monitoring, maintenance, and proactive improvement.
A guaranteed 15-minute emergency response plus monthly on-demand hours that bank when unused.
Project-based engagements for migrations, performance tuning, data modernization, business intelligence, and high availability and disaster recovery.
A cloud readiness assessment gives you a workload-level decision on what moves, a sequenced plan with timelines and risks, and a total cost comparison against what the estate costs to run today.
Let us show you what's possible.
Two ways to start
Read-only. Nothing changes during the assessment.