AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment

Optimize your license and compute costs before and after migration

Discover the best path to cloud migration and cost reduction with the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA). This complimentary program empowers both new and existing customers to assess and optimize their on-premises and cloud environments, reduce required instances, and enhance resource efficiency.

Analyze your actual resource use, third-party licensing, and application dependencies with an AWS OLA. The data gathered will help you make informed decisions for your cloud journey. Request an AWS OLA and let our expert team guide you.

The AWS OLA delivers a comprehensive report that models your deployment options based on actual resource use and your existing licensing entitlements, helping you uncover potential cost savings through our flexible licensing options.

Benefits

Rightsize your resources

Optimize resource utilization of your workloads with our tool-based discovery approach. Our tooling offers insight into compute resources and helps to identify the best Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instance size and type for each workload. Determine the right mix of on-demand and spot instances, Bring your Own Licenses (BYOL) and license-included instances, as well as dedicated hosts and savings plans tailored for your environment.

Reduce costs

Running workloads in the cloud requires fewer instances and licenses due to the elasticity of the cloud. Optimizing your cloud infrastructure is key to reducing costs, and performing an AWS OLA offers 60% greater license efficiency. Overprovisioning third-party licensing increases your total cost of ownership. Use the recommendations from an AWS OLA to maximize value and configure instances to require fewer licenses. Adapt your on-premises licensing strategy for a smoother cloud migration.

Explore flexible licensing options

Avoid unnecessary licensing costs with the results of the AWS OLA. Model licensing scenarios, including license-included or BYOL instances, for flexibility in managing seasonal workloads and agile experimentation. An AWS OLA models both dedicated and license-included environments, letting you pay for what you use to get the most out of your cloud compute and licensing costs.

How it works

Covered workloads

Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Server on Amazon EC2

Research has shown that when migrating to AWS, customers can reduce the cost of Windows Server licenses by an average of 77% and SQL Server licenses by an average of 45%. Running the same workloads in the cloud requires fewer instances and significantly reduces costs. The AWS OLA analysis will model your Microsoft SQL Server workloads on AWS, using CPU core optimization, database consolidation, and SQL Server edition optimization to reduce licensing costs without reducing performance.
 

VMware-based workloads to AWS

Gain insights into your existing VMware environment including licensing, infrastructure resource usage, storage, dependencies, and costs when migrating VMware workloads to AWS. Understand the different migration pathways that align with your overall cloud strategy. An AWS OLA helps assess your on-premises and cloud environments, and provide recommendations to optimize instances and licensing for your VMware environment prior to migration. Maximize cost savings and optimize performance on AWS.

Oracle Database and Oracle business applications

An assessment of over 5,700 Oracle instances indicated that running Oracle on AWS required an average of 35% fewer cores than on premises. For additional savings, 47% of databases were identified as good candidates for utilizing Oracle Standard edition instead of the more expensive Oracle Enterprise edition. 50% of databases were well suited for migration to the cost-effective open-source platform PostgreSQL. Run an AWS OLA and identify the best options for your environment.

Hear what our customers are saying

“We needed a cloud-specific solution that would suit our business-critical SQL Server applications. Using an AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA), we were able to not only find the AWS solution that was right for our applications, but also understand the most cost-effective strategy for migrating our workloads. Now that we’ve used OLA, we gained the visibility and knowledge to modernize our legacy applications—and business— on AWS.”

Saleem Brahmanapalli, Vice President of Systems Engineering, Pearson

“Even before we migrated, AWS helped us prepare for our migration through an Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) that helped us rightsize our instances to control our costs during migration by 18-20%. After migrating our Windows workloads to AWS, we are able to scale up and down easily to handle fluctuating server traffic. Now, we have the freedom to focus on innovation instead of managing our physical servers, and improved our speed to upload and download applications.”

Tommaso Salsetta, ICT Manager Italy, Giunti Psychometrics

“When we needed to vacate one of our co-located data centers, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team was very responsive. They quickly gave us the total cost of ownership (TCO) of running the workloads on AWS as well as the migration path for our Windows and SQL server-based workloads. They provided assistance to our migration partner and ensured a quick and successful migration. We are saving 15% annually by migrating to AWS versus on-premises data center spend. We’re currently engaged in modernizing our workload to take advantage of managed cloud services.”

Namita Jindal, CIO, CentralSquare Technologies
 

“Acentra Health was formed in 2023 after the merger of industry leaders CNSI and Kepro. At that time, we sought to migrate existing workloads from our two legacy data centers to AWS and build new cloud-native solutions based on an integrated cloud framework. We knew this approach would enable us to deliver maximum value and impact to our clients by improving availability and scalability, while also reducing costs. The Optimization and Assessment program (OLA) helped us on both fronts. By right-sizing on AWS, we were able to optimize compute and memory and reduce them by 37% and 18% respectively.”

Dinesh Kumar, Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure Services, Acentra Health