IT Infrastructure

The Top 7 Cloud Migration Assessment Tools

Cloud migration assessment tools assist in evaluating and planning the migration of applications and workloads to the cloud, providing insights into dependencies, costs, and feasibility.

Last updated on Jan 8, 2025
Alex Zawalnyski
Laura Iannini
Written by Alex Zawalnyski Technical Review by Laura Iannini
The Top 7 Cloud Migration Assessment Tools include:
  1. 1.
    AvePoint Migrator
  2. 2.
    AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART)
  3. 3.
    Azure Migrate
  4. 4.
    CAST Highlight
  5. 5.
    CloudFuze X-Change

Cloud migration assessment tools enable organizations to plan, optimize, and execute the migration of their applications and data to the cloud. These tools play a critical role in ensuring a smooth, seamless, and efficient migration process, while minimizing risks and downtime. With enterprises increasingly adopting cloud-based solutions to optimize their operations, selecting the right migration assessment tool has become all the more important.

Cloud migration assessment tools provide valuable insights into an organization’s applications and infrastructure. This helps to identify potential bottlenecks, dependencies, and areas in need of optimization. These tools can evaluate application performance, security, and costs in both on-premises and cloud environments, with the aim of generating an actionable migration plan that suits an organization’s unique needs and requirements.

In this guide, we will explore the top cloud migration assessment tools and consider their key features and capabilities. These features commonly include resource allocation, workload discovery, cost analysis, security analysis, and ongoing monitoring. We’ll base our selections on industry research, expert opinions, and customer feedback to help enterprises find a tool that best aligns with their cloud migration objectives.

AvePoint Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS) is a comprehensive solution for migrating Office 365 and SharePoint content, offering a cloud migration assessment as part of the process. This service is designed to handle the complexity of migration, ensuring a smooth transition to Microsoft Office 365 or SharePoint from start to finish. AvePoint’s expert team, composed of Microsoft-certified engineers, have assisted thousands of customers worldwide in migrating to Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint platforms.

The company utilizes award-winning migration tools and a proven methodology, which have been used to discover, classify, and move over 8 petabytes of data from more than a dozen source systems. AvePoint MaaS follows a full-service approach, offering consultation and migration implementation based on each client’s scope and requirements. This allows organizations to consolidate their cloud services or transition from legacy repositories such as Livelink, Lotus Notes, EMC Documentum, Quickr, and eRoom.

AvePoint MaaS process consists of several stages, including discovery, assessment, pilot, execution, and onboarding. The service begins with a comprehensive review of the client’s business needs and current production environment, followed by assessing governance or hardware gaps. After a pilot test, the migration process starts with full and incremental data transfers, complete with status reports for stakeholders. Any changes made during the migration process are synchronized, and users are transitioned to the new destination environment.

1.

AvePoint Migrator

AvePoint Migrator Logo

The AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) is designed to help organizations assess their readiness for cloud adoption and identify gaps in skills and processes. By taking a 16-question self-service survey (that is available in multiple languages), organizations receive a custom report that evaluates their migration readiness across six perspectives: business planning, security, operations, people, platform, and process. This report includes a heatmap, radar chart, and detailed scoring information.

CART is based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (AWS CAF), which incorporates AWS best practices to assist in digital transformation and innovative use of AWS services. The detailed report not only highlights areas where organizations score highly, but also provides resources to help improve areas that need development, setting them on a path towards successful cloud adoption. The tool allows businesses to visualize their strengths and weaknesses as well as prioritizing remediation activities, thereby ensuring a smoother migration process.

2.

AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART)

AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) Logo

Azure Migrate is a comprehensive platform designed for cloud migration and modernization. It offers a unified approach for businesses to discover, assess, and migrate on-premises resources to Azure. With the help of Azure Migrate, businesses can plan their migration with insights into their infrastructure, databases, and applications, moving securely and iteratively in phases to optimize performance and costs.

Azure Migrate enables easy identification and collection of information on infrastructure, databases, applications, and Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDI). By mapping dependencies and estimating costs for various Azure scenarios, businesses can create a proposal to make the decision to migrate to Azure. The platform also assesses the readiness of on-premises resources for migration and allows businesses to create a customized, phased migration plan.

Using Azure Migrate is not only cost-efficient, but it also helps drive innovation. Businesses can move to Azure in waves, monitor progress on a central dashboard, and make use of the native flexibility and extensibility features. This is be enhanced through integrations with third-party tools. Azure Migrate also allows testing of resources in Azure before decommissioning on-premises assets and provides optimal cost management and peak innovation through modernization.

Azure Migrate comes free with an Azure subscription, offering several cost optimization features, although there may be additional charges for using partner tools. By using Azure Migrate’s features, businesses can right-size resources based on usage trends and take advantage of Azure’s hybrid benefits, reserved instances, and savings plan incentives included in the business case feature.

3.

Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate Logo

CAST Highlight is a comprehensive application assessment solution suitable for M&A tech due diligence, troubleshooting applications, and acquiring custom-code software. The platform offers in-depth analysis and actionable recommendations, covering aspects such as composition, security risks, technical debt, software standards compliance, code and database complexity, application architecture, cloud readiness, and industry benchmarks. It provides businesses with insights into their current or prospective software applications and portfolios.

In addition to application assessment, CAST Highlight offers cloud readiness assessment for organizations planning to migrate to cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, or IBM Cloud. The solution scans and identifies potential issues in source code to facilitate a smooth transition to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) models. It also offers recommendations on application refactoring priorities and preliminary financial estimates for cloud migration.

CAST Highlight stands out for its automated portfolio governance across hundreds of applications, providing instant drilldowns, recommendations, and rapid implementation. Key benefits include ongoing reduction of maintenance costs and technical debt, faster cloud migration, and improved control of open-source legal and security risks. The platform also supports greener software development, helping organizations develop more sustainable technology solutions and meet emerging requirements.

With compatibility across more than 50 technologies, CAST Highlight offers customizable dashboards, instant drilldowns, REST APIs, and CI/CD plug-ins. The solution features diverse capabilities including software health monitoring, cloud maturity assessment, software composition analysis, and green impact evaluation.

4.

CAST Highlight

CAST Highlight Logo

CloudFuze X-Change is a versatile cloud migration service that enables businesses to transfer their cloud data, including user accounts and permissions. With the capacity to migrate large amounts of data securely and quickly, CloudFuze is a trusted solution for organizations with high data privacy and security needs. The platform supports migration from on-premise storage to cloud storage, as well as between cloud services.

Able to handle the migration of thousands of users and petabytes of data, CloudFuze is designed for a wide range of organizations – from federal agencies and universities to large enterprises. The service offers multi-user migration, making the transition process smooth and efficient for businesses. Additionally, CloudFuze’s highly secure and robust migration engine ensures maximum data protection through encryption and meets regulatory needs such as SOC compliance and GDPR requirements.

Beyond migration, CloudFuze allows organizations to sync multiple business clouds, helping businesses streamline their cloud management. CloudFuze’s team of migration engineers and certified cloud professionals provide services that include pre-migration analysis, content reassessment, and end-user assistance to ensure a smooth transition and an optimal cloud environment. Overall, CloudFuze offers a comprehensive and reliable solution for businesses of all sizes seeking a seamless and secure cloud migration experience.

5.

CloudFuze X-Change

CloudFuze X-Change Logo

Google Cloud’s Rapid Migration Program (RaMP) is a comprehensive, end-to-end migration program designed to help customers move their IT infrastructure to the cloud seamlessly. The program offers data-driven discovery and analytics, providing a detailed roadmap with timeline, costs, resources, and risks. Customers benefit from expert guidance, best practices, and a transparent transition plan.

RaMP offers a systematic approach to cloud migration, beginning with an opportunity evaluation that maps out cloud-based options based on the customer’s IT landscape. This is followed by a foundation and planning stage, where workloads ideal for the cloud are identified and the required foundation is built. The migration and validation stage involves transferring workloads to the cloud, with continuous analysis and evaluation to refine the process. Finally, the optimize and operate stage assesses the performance of workloads in the cloud, making adjustments as needed before fully transitioning to cloud-based operations.

This structured migration program creates a flywheel effect, where the learnings and experience from each migration informs subsequent transfers, thereby streamlining the entire process and improving results over time. By using Google Cloud RaMP, customers can enjoy successful cloud migration with reduced costs, minimized risks, and expert support.

6.

Google Rapid Migration Program (RaMP)

Google Rapid Migration Program (RaMP) Logo

The Strategic Migration Assessment and Readiness Tool (SMART) is designed to help organizations prepare for Microsoft Azure migration by assessing their business strategy, partner support system, inventory, business goals, migration plan, technical skills, landing zone environment, governance, and cloud management. Users can choose to focus on specific areas or answer all assessment questions, and upon completion, they receive a report identifying areas for improvement and resources to help address those issues.

To maximize the effectiveness of the SMART tool, it is recommended to complete the 17-question assessment either with a Microsoft account member or by consulting experts across various categories before attempting it on your own. The process takes about 30 minutes and provides valuable insights into your organization’s digital transformation efforts.

Upon completion, the SMART tool generates a results page containing tailored recommendations and next steps for improving scores in each category. Users can view their strengths and opportunities for growth in a matrix format and export the results to a CSV file. The assessment also provides an overall grade and recommended next steps for each individual category. Users can review the answer summary to understand the reasoning behind specific recommendations or scores.

The SMART tool also offers a milestone feature allowing organizations to measure their growth and improvement as they take the assessment multiple times. This enables businesses to gauge progress towards migration readiness and effectively address any gaps in their digital transformation strategy.

7.

Microsoft Strategic Migration Assessment

Microsoft Strategic Migration Assessment Logo
The Top Cloud Migration Assessment Tools

Everything You Need To Know About Cloud Migration Assessment Tools (FAQs)

What Are Cloud Migration Assessment Tools?

Cloud migration is a processes that most businesses will end up going through at some point. By transferring processes to the cloud, organizations are able to increase operational flexibility, reduce costs, and easily scale to meet business needs. This makes it easier for remote employees to access the data and applications they need to perform key tasks.

Even if cloud migration is almost inevitable for many organizations, that does not mean it is always easily achieved.

Cloud migration assessment tools allow organizations to gather data on how their organization is currently operating and the repercussions of adopting a cloud approach. This type of tool is used during the planning phase pre-migration and ensures that the process of migration can be as straight forward as possible.

Cloud migration assessment tools will help you to understand what services need to be transferred, and the best way to go about doing so. It may be preferable to transfer services and processes in waves, ensuring that any misconfigurations can be easily identified and rectified. Alternatively, you may want to migrate processes over a shorter timetable, even if this means you must endure some network downtime.

How Do Cloud Migration Assessment Tools Work?

Cloud migration assessment tools function by gathering technical data about your current operational set up, and the details of your desired cloud implementation.

The assessment will use automated features to understand the scope of your cloud migration, ensuring that no areas are overlooked or ignored.

This data will be used to develop a roadmap for migration, with special attention paid to the risks, timeframe, costs, and other things to be aware of through the process. They also produce actionable intelligence by suggesting areas that may be under or overserved within your prospective cloud set up. This wealth of information puts you in a strong position when embarking on a cloud migration journey.

What Features Should You Look For In Cloud Migration Assessment Tools?

When selecting a cloud migration assessment, you’ll want to ensure that your solution is the right one for your use-case and needs. The effectiveness of your assessment tool may impact how successful your cloud migration process is. In this section we’ll highlight some of the key features to look for when considering a cloud migration assessment.

  1. Comprehensive Data Ingestion – While this may sound like an obvious point, it is an important one. Your cloud migration assessment tool should take in data from across your estate to ensure that it can be properly accounted for during the migration processes. If an area is not properly accounted for in the migration plan, you may experience technical difficulties and holdups.
  2. Actionable Intelligence – Rather than simply highlighting areas of note within its analysis, an effective cloud migration tool should be able to make sense of this data, help you to understand why it’s significant, and suggest ways that any issues can be resolved.
  3. Discover Dependencies – You may think you have a clear idea of how your services interact, but there may be dependencies that you are unaware of. A Cloud migration assessment tool should be able to identify dependencies to properly account for any changes, ensure that there are no unexpected disruptions.
  4. Cost Projection – A good solution should be able to accurately forecast how much you are likely to spend per monthly as part of your cloud operations. This is important as it will help decision makers to make the most appropriate choices.
Written By

Alex is an experienced journalist and content editor. He researches, writes, factchecks and edits articles relating to B2B cyber security and technology solutions, working alongside software experts. Alex was awarded a First Class MA (Hons) in English and Scottish Literature by the University of Edinburgh.

Technical Review
Laura Iannini
Laura Iannini Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.