Operations, Optimization, and Governance After Migration
Domain scope
This domain covers operations, optimization, and governance after cutover: monitoring, cost management, security posture, patching, backup, disaster recovery, service levels, and decommissioning. The exam tests whether migration benefits are sustained.
Core rules
- Establish service-level objectives and monitoring for availability, latency, error rate, saturation, and business transactions. Include logs, metrics, traces, and alerts with ownership.
- Govern cost through tags, budgets, anomaly alerts, showback or chargeback, and periodic rightsizing. Separate migration one-time costs from run-rate.
- Maintain security and compliance continuously: patch cadence, vulnerability management, identity reviews, encryption, and configuration drift detection.
- Test backup restore and disaster recovery on a schedule. Validate that RTO and RPO still match business needs after architecture changes.
- Decommission source systems only after data retention, legal hold, archive, and dependency checks. Orphaned resources are a common post-migration cost leak.
Worked example
A monthly cost review shows a 35% run-rate increase after migration. Tagging reveals an analytics team left four oversized instances running and retained 40 TB of snapshots from the pilot. The team rightsizes two instances, moves cold snapshots to archive storage, adds autoscaling for batch, and sets a budget alert at 80% of forecast. Separately, a restore test fails because the backup policy excluded a new file share; the policy is corrected and the restore is repeated. The source data center is decommissioned only after the retention period and legal review.
Traps
Treating cutover as the end; having no cost owner; leaving orphaned volumes and snapshots; skipping restore tests; and decommissioning the source before retention and dependency checks.