Customer needs assessment
Purpose. Establish business context and technical scope before discovery
workshops. Completed with the customer, reviewed by the technical lead.
| Field | Detail |
|---|
| Customer name | |
| Company name | |
| Email | |
| Phone | |
| Date | |
| Completed by | |
02 — Business overview
- Briefly describe the business and its technology needs.
- Which products or services depend on cloud infrastructure?
- Who are the main customers, and what do they expect for reliability and
performance?
- What are the short-term and long-term cloud goals?
03 — Current environment
- What are the key drivers for moving to AWS or upgrading the current
infrastructure?
- Which AWS services are in use today, if any?
- Describe the current hosting: on-premises, colocation, another cloud, or a
mixture.
- How many environments exist, and how do they differ?
- What is the current monthly infrastructure cost, and how is it allocated?
- What is the current architecture? Attach a diagram or describe the components.
04 — Applications and workloads
| Application | Purpose | Stack | Users | Criticality |
|---|
| | | | |
- Which applications are business-critical, and what is the impact of downtime?
- Are there legacy applications with constraints on migration?
- What are the peak load characteristics — when, and how much?
05 — DevOps requirements
- What version control system is in use?
- How is code currently built and deployed? Describe the last deployment.
- How often do you deploy, and how long does a deployment take?
- Is infrastructure defined in code? Which tool?
- What testing exists — unit, integration, end-to-end, performance?
- How are environments provisioned and kept consistent?
- What are the biggest delivery bottlenecks?
06 — Migration needs
- What is the migration approach — rehost, replatform, refactor, or undecided?
- Is there a cutover date or business event driving the timeline?
- What data must be migrated, how much, and with what tolerance for downtime?
- What are the acceptable RTO and RPO?
- Are there dependencies on systems that will remain on-premises?
07 — Security and compliance
- Which compliance standards apply — ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR,
local regulation?
- What data classifications exist, and where does sensitive data reside?
- What are the current identity and access arrangements?
- Are there existing security tools that must be integrated?
- What audit evidence must be produced, for whom, and how often?
08 — Technical requirements
- Any requirements on network topology, connectivity or data residency?
- Any requirements on operating system, runtime or database engine?
- What availability target applies to each workload?
- Are there performance targets — latency, throughput, concurrency?
- What is the disaster recovery expectation?
09 — Monitoring and operations
- What monitoring exists today, and who uses it?
- How are incidents detected and escalated?
- Is there an on-call rotation?
- What operational tasks are performed manually and repeatedly?
- What documentation exists for operations?
10 — Budget and timeline
| Item | Detail |
|---|
| Budget range for the engagement | |
| Expected monthly AWS spend | |
| Approved timeline | |
| Constraints on start or end | |
| Procurement process and lead time | |
11 — Decision-making
| Role | Name | Involvement |
|---|
| Executive sponsor | | Approves budget and scope |
| Technical decision-maker | | Approves architecture |
| Day-to-day contact | | Coordinates access and reviews |
- Who signs off on the statement of work?
- Who accepts deliverables?
- What is the escalation path when a decision is blocked?
Anything else that would change the approach — previous failed initiatives,
organisational sensitivities, upcoming events, or constraints that are not obvious
from the technical picture.
Review record
| Reviewer | Role | Date | Comments |
|---|
| Technical lead | | |