Migrating to the cloud with cost management in mind

There are a multitude of reasons why customers look to migrate or modernize on the cloud. Aside from cutting operational costs, they can move faster and transform customer experiences, drive new innovations and business models, or deliver on a digital transformation or business modernization.

A recent study conducted by The Hackett Group revealed that organizations that migrated to AWS from on-premises achieved quantifiable business value such as:

• 69% decrease in unplanned downtime
• 43% lower time to market for new features
• 29% increase in staff focus on innovation
• 20% cost savings on technology infrastructure

Realizing business benefits from the cloud

You should ask yourself some foundational questions to identify if you’re ready to migrate to the cloud, keeping in mind that the migration process is an iterative one, and that answering “no” to any of these shouldn’t be a roadblock to migrating. Instead, these questions can serve as a baseline for aligning your business goals against the potential business value you can achieve by migrating and/or modernizing on the cloud:

1. Innovation and speed-to-market: Are your on-premises apps and data preventing or slowing down your ability to deliver a better customer experience, develop new products and services, and/or uplift your company’s value or competitive position?

2. Cost savings and productivity: Could you be saving time and money through cloud’s fully managed offerings by relocating or replacing resources you currently spend on managing, maintaining, and provisioning hardware and software, managing licenses, creating and maintaining security postures, and ensuring compliance?

3. Infrastructure and business systems: Is your current infrastructure delivering the performance and scale needed to keep teams working efficiently? Is your critical business data accessible and delivering the insights your business needs to compete? Are your legacy systems integrated with modern systems to deliver optimal customer experiences?

4. Skill gaps and modernization: Does your team have the necessary skills and experience to complete a migration without assistance? Should you engage with AWS experts or a third-party vendor to provide backup and training to help accelerate the achievement of your migration and modernization goals?

📖  A conversation on the best practices to maximize business value from the cloud

Managing cost and usage during migrations

For many of our customers, the majority of their resources are devoted to supporting existing workloads (technical debt), with only a small fraction of their total IT budgets spent on innovation. The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) helps customers achieve substantial business benefit by providing an approach and investments to accelerate, reduce the risk of, and help offset the cost to migrate their workloads to AWS.

To realize these benefits, it’s essential that businesses rethink their financial management strategies. How do you move from a fixed cost to a pay-per-consumption model and optimize for variable costs? Left unattended, outdated financial management practices can become a blocker and prevent digital business transformation that is capable of executing and innovating at speed.

To take full advantage of the benefits of the cloud, including decreased cost and increased business agility, you need to define and execute a migration plan that is aligned with your current capabilities and workload requirements. At the same time, it’s vital to know what, when, and how cost management levers can be pulled throughout your migration journey.

📹   Watch CFM Talks Manage AWS cost and usage during migrations