Purpose of the assessment
A readiness assessment establishes what the facility and its contents can support today, what they will not support, and what must change first. It precedes design, procurement and migration decisions; its output is a report of findings, each with a rating and a required action.
Facility and physical infrastructure
- Available power capacity, at the utility feed, the distribution boards and each rack, compared with the existing and planned load.
- Redundancy of power paths: dual feeds, A/B distribution, UPS runtime and generator arrangements.
- Cooling capacity against heat load, and airflow design (containment, blanking, rack orientation).
- Rack space, rack depth and weight limits, and floor loading.
- Cable pathways and spare capacity in trays and ducts; separation of power and data cabling.
- Fire detection and suppression, water detection and environmental monitoring.
- Physical access control, visitor procedures and logging.
Network and connectivity
- Core, aggregation and access topology; uplink capacity and oversubscription.
- Separation of production, storage, management and out-of-band networks.
- External connectivity: number of carriers, path diversity and entry points.
- Addressing plan, routing design and documented firewall rules.
Compute, storage and virtualisation estate
- Inventory of servers, storage and network devices with model, firmware, support status and end-of-support dates.
- Utilisation of processor, memory, storage capacity and storage performance, including peaks.
- Cluster headroom: whether the cluster could lose a host and keep running its workloads.
- Consistency of configuration, and the number of separate management systems.
Applications, dependencies and recovery
- Application inventory with owners, criticality and dependencies.
- Recovery objectives per application, and whether the current backup and replication design can meet them.
- Date and result of the last restore test and the last disaster-recovery test.
- Licence constraints that affect migration or consolidation.
Security, operations and documentation
- Administrative access model, privileged accounts and remote access paths.
- Patch status of operating systems, firmware and security appliances.
- Monitoring coverage and alert handling; log retention.
- Accuracy of network diagrams, rack layouts, cable schedules and asset records, checked against a physical walk-through.
Rating the findings
A simple, consistent rating scheme keeps the report actionable.
| Rating | Meaning | Typical handling |
|---|---|---|
| Blocking | Prevents the planned work from proceeding safely | Resolve before design is finalised or work begins |
| Constraining | Limits scope, capacity or schedule | Reflect in design assumptions and plan |
| Advisory | Increases risk or effort but does not constrain the work | Record, assign owner, review at design stage |
Each finding should name the evidence it is based on, the consequence for the programme and a recommended action.