Strategic IT planning and evaluation

Data-informed decision making and dynamic forecasting for your variable IT expenses

As you migrate and modernize your workloads in the cloud environment, you want to understand how you evaluate your IT spending and align it with your business priorities.

AWS provides you with tools and best practices to identify and quantify value creation areas beyond cost savings. Rather than treating your IT as a cost center, you will understand the economic performance of your IT investment and make data-driven business decisions. You will also have access to resources that can help you estimate, budget, and dynamically adjust your IT budget allocations to meet changing business needs.

Benefits

Life cycle guidance

Tools and resources are available throughout your IT planning cycle. You can choose from a variety of self-service planning tools, or consult with AWS experts to form your own migration and forecasting strategies that are best suited for your unique business needs.

Data-informed decisions

No more guesswork or mining stale data in spreadsheets. Empower yourself with live data collected and analyzed based on your current resource utilization, or projected based on the usage trend and future-state scenarios. Make data-informed decisions while you evaluate and prioritize IT projects.

Dynamic planning

Adapt your planning and budgeting processes with dynamic, customizable configurations to meet your ongoing IT acquisition and deprecation needs. Improve the accuracy of forecasting and the control of budgeting with the agility you need for your variable IT spend.

Use Cases

Data-driven business cases

You need a proven framework and resources that can help you identify and quantify the economic value expected from your IT investment.

AWS Cloud Value Framework provides instruments to create your business case with economic performance indicators, gauging cost saving, operational efficiency, staff productivity, and business agility. AWS also provides you benchmarking data that serves as both peer comparison and directional value assessment for your business cases.

Migration acceleration

You need resources that can map your existing infrastructure to equivalent AWS service offerings and explore cost saving opportunities.

AWS Migration Evaluator projects your future-state AWS configurations and costs by baselining your current on-premises infrastructure and resources utilization. It also recommends cost saving opportunities across your environments, ensuring your applications are run with the right resources and at the lowest cost.

Self-service cost estimate

You want to explore AWS services and their pricing based on your architectural needs and set expectations for your IT budgeting.

AWS Pricing Calculator allows you to estimate your AWS spend by services, service groups as part of your architecture setup, or your architecture solution as a whole. You can compare costs of various AWS services, compute instance sizes, purchase options, and/or in different AWS Regions. Share these estimates with your stakeholders, and reach consensus on your budgeting.

Efficient organizational planning

An efficient mechanism is needed to plan and manage your AWS environment and resources at scale.

AWS Organizations helps you centrally govern your AWS environment as you grow and scale on AWS. Programmatically create accounts, allocate resources to accounts or organizational units (OUs). Apply Service Control Polices (SCPs) to create desired usage boundaries for your accounts or OUs.

Pre-approved IT services

Balance the speed to deploy IT services and the consistency in governance and control.

AWS Service Catalog allows your organizations to create and manage catalogs of pre-approved AWS services and AWS Marketplace software. Users can quickly discover and deploy these services at a self-service portal, where your organizations can also ensure compliance with corporate standards.

Granular budget thresholds, reporting and alerting

You need flexibility to plan, budget, and monitor your spend at desired granular levels.

AWS Budgets lets you configure granular thresholds for cost and usage incurred on AWS and AWS Marketplace, as well as the targeted coverage and utilization rate for your AWS Reserved Instances and Savings Plans. Set up your AWS Budgets Reports and Budget Alerts, so you can be notified in excess of threshold.