{"id":7378,"date":"2020-06-04T15:43:59","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T15:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rax-stg-wp-aws.com\/blogs\/do-you-have-an-operational-readiness-checklist\/"},"modified":"2026-11-03T19:28:38","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T19:28:38","slug":"do-you-have-an-operational-readiness-checklist","status":"publish","type":"blogs","link":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/blogs\/do-you-have-an-operational-readiness-checklist\/","title":{"rendered":"Do you have an operational readiness checklist?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As mentioned in&nbsp;a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/blog\/focusing-just-cost-optimization-youve-already-wasted-money\">previous post<\/a>, you should consider operational readiness when you prepare to move business-critical applications and production workloads to the public cloud. You should run operational readiness checks with your Operations team in both the solution&nbsp;design phase and the go-live phase.<\/p>\n<p>\nThis post outlines the operational readiness checks for the go-live phase after you build the solution. These checks ensure that you manage all key risk areas and confirm the services are in the best possible state before it go live with&nbsp;production-level traffic.<\/p>\n<p>For your operational readiness checklists, consider the following categories:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>IT service management<\/li>\n<li>On-going account governance model<\/li>\n<li>On-going operations<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>IT service management<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Best practice reviews<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Various cloud providers have services that review cloud workloads and provide recommendations on best practices. Amazon Web Services\u00ae (AWS) and Microsoft Azure\u00ae both have a trusted advisor while Google\u00ae has its security command&nbsp;center. We recommend that you review these recommendations in detail before you&nbsp;go live to ensure that you are following the cloud vendors&#8217; best practices.<\/p>\n<p>While considering your environment, you can also review resources such as architecture frameworks and associated whitepapers to ensure that you follow&nbsp;deployment best practices. There are also third-party cloud management platforms&nbsp;that can provide enhanced checks. For example, at Rackspace, we use CloudHealth\u00ae&nbsp;by VMware\u00ae. Reviewing all the advice and selecting cloud management platforms&nbsp;is time-consuming but certainly worthwhile when looking at highly critical business systems.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Infrastructure deployment practices<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We recommend that you deploy all infrastructure by using Infrastructure as Code&nbsp;(IaC). Ahead of going live, ensure that you synchronize the code base for IaC&nbsp;and the cloud environment.<\/p>\n<p>You should define and test your continuous integration and continuous deployment&nbsp;(CI\/CD) pipelines to make sure they work as designed. This step ensures that the&nbsp;environments remain in a consistent state because deviations can cause entropy, which almost certainly introduces service-impacting events.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Operational runbooks<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You should create an operational runbook and confirm that it&#8217;s valid. &nbsp;The runbook considers traditional IT Service Management (ITSM) factors such as:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Event management<\/li>\n<li>Incident management<\/li>\n<li>Problem management<\/li>\n<li>Change management<\/li>\n<li>Configuration management (and appropriate use of a CMDB)<\/li>\n<li>Escalation procedures<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>On-going account governance model<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Resource tagging<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Ensure that all your resources meet your company&#8217;s tagging strategy. This&nbsp;practice helps you to manage these environments in the future.<\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Resource allocations and autoscaling policies<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>\n&nbsp;When you transition a service into production, ensure that all the resources&nbsp;you allocate meet the demands of operating under a real-world traffic load. This check includes sizing instances and allocating resources for Platform as a Service (PaaS) technologies. Doing performance testing or stress testing buys you even more confidence as your traffic ramps up.<br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Define key stakeholders<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Ensure that you identify and document all internal and external stakeholders&#8217; names for a workload with relevant contact details. Stakeholders might include the following individuals:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Application owner<\/li>\n<li>Front-end web and back-end developers<\/li>\n<li>Escalation contacts<\/li>\n<li>Operational teams<\/li>\n<li>Individuals responsible for architecture and infrastructure deployment within&nbsp;the solution<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Cost approval<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now that you have built the solution and it&#8217;s ready to go live, validate that the costs are consistent with the forecasted costs to ensure that these services&nbsp;remain commercially viable.<\/p>\n<p><strong>On-going operations<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>Backups<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>You should back up or configure replication for all business-critical data. Make sure you test these processes and confirm that they are consistent with the&nbsp;solution recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) goals.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Logging<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Configure and enable an appropriate level of logging for all services. Validate that you enabled a suitable level of verbosity and that you captured adequate data. Also, consider the log retention periods.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Patching<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Document your approach to all solutions so you can apply system updates per the&nbsp;organization&#8217;s vulnerability assessment program. Don&#8217;t forget to consider&nbsp;potential penetration testing or other security and vulnerability scans of the&nbsp;infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Service monitoring<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You should configure, enable, and test end-to-end service monitoring to ensure that monitoring notifications work as expected. Ensure that the teams who need&nbsp;to use the playbooks help to define them and understand them.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Disaster recovery<\/strong><br \/>\nIf you defined disaster recovery and business continuity plans during the solution&nbsp;design phase, test and validate them. Consider the RPO and RTO.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Use the checklists<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Review these checklists with your Operations team to ensure that everything that&nbsp;you decided during the earlier solution architecture phase was correct and that&nbsp;the cloud environment is production-ready. This review is primarily about reducing risk and making sure you cover the most common areas that need more consideration&nbsp;during the go-live phase.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s worth noting this is a non-exhaustive list, and additional considerations&nbsp;depend on your organization. If you need any support with getting cloud-ready,&nbsp;Rackspace is here to help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do you have an operational readiness checklist?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7380,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","nid":"26403","content_type":"blog","created_by":"10130","authored_on":"2023-12-19T16:43:59+00:00","field_article_industries":"","tag_category":"Technical","field_blog_author_text":"by Keiran Holloway, Senior Manager, Rackspace Technology","seo_description":"Understand the importance of operational readiness when moving to the public cloud. Ensure optimal service performance and risk management.\r\n","field_featured_image":"","insights_image":"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/blog_technical_images\/26403-insights_image-productivity-technical-blog-1-insights.jpg","field_partners":"","rxt_platforms":"Cloud","product":"","publisheddate":"2020-06-04T15:43:59","rxt_solutions":"","opengraph_tag":"","x_tag":"","teaser_flag":"Technical Blog","seo_titile":"Cloud Migration Readiness Checklist | Rackspace Technology","field_topics":"","field_slug":"do-you-have-an-operational-readiness-checklist","footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[204],"class_list":["post-7378","blogs","type-blogs","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-technical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blogs\/7378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blogs"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/blogs"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7378"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blogs\/7378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7379,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blogs\/7378\/revisions\/7379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}