Migration & Modernization

Unleashing the Power of the Cloud with the AWS Cloud Value Framework (CVF) – Introduction (1/7)

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are seeking ways to optimize their operations, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and gain a competitive edge. Embracing the cloud has become an indispensable strategy to achieve these goals.

To help organizations understand the full potential of the cloud, AWS created the AWS Cloud Value Framework (CVF). The CVF serves as a comprehensive guide for businesses to evaluate, quantify, and communicate the value of AWS Cloud adoption. It comprises five pillars:

In February of 2022, The Hackett Group published The Business Value of Migration to Amazon Web Services. This study was based on a survey of more than 1,000 global organizations migrating from on-premises to cloud-hosted applications. The CVF helped these organizations achieve quantifiable business value in the areas of resiliency, agility, cost savings, and staff productivity.

In this series of blog posts, we will explain how you can apply the Cloud Value Framework in your migration strategy. Each blog will focus on a specific pillar in the CVF, and will include:

  • The benefits that organizations have been able to achieve with AWS
  • Examples and case studies
  • How to demonstrate value for this pillar within your own migration

Before explaining the pillars and value achieved, one consideration is the Migration Strategy. A migration strategy is the technique used to migrate a workload into the AWS Cloud. There are seven migration strategies, known as the seven Rs – table 1 summarizes the seven approaches and further details can be found here.

R Treatment Description
Rehost Applications that you move without changing the application.
Replatform After moving the application to the cloud, some level of optimization is introduced. This is done to operate the application efficiently, reduce costs, or to take advantage of cloud capabilities.
Rearchitect or Refactor To improve agility, performance, and scalability, move the application to the cloud and modify its architecture by taking full advantage of cloud-native features
Relocate Servers, comprising of one or more applications, migrated from an on-premises platform to a cloud version of the platform.
Repurpose Replace your application with a different version or product. Typically, this is repurchasing an on-premises application with Software as a Service (SaaS).
Retain Applications that you want to keep on-premises or you are not ready to migrate.
Retire Applications that you want to decommission or archive.

Table 1: Summary of the 7 R migration strategies

The Hackett Group report highlighted that the respondents “have migrated most of their “easy” applications – those that needed little or no refactoring or rearchitecting, or that were already on the modernization roadmap due to obsolescence.” We have seen the business value vary depending on the migration strategy. Illustrated in Figure 2, the Business Value of Cloud Modernization increases as you modernize in the cloud. This means the benchmarks used in this blog series are more aligned to the business value for “easy “applications where you may achieve increased value by refactoring or rearchitecting your applications.

Figure 3 shows a typical IT environment by migration pattern. We see customers using most, and sometimes all, of the migration strategies. Some patterns are more popular than others. We see Rehost frequently across customers looking to move quickly. To identify the strategy that meets your business needs, we recommend performing a Detailed Application Assessment.

The image shows a typical IT environment, split by migration pattern. The Migration patterns are Rehost, Rehost +, Replatform, Rearchitect, Repurchase, Retain, and Retire. For each migration pattern, there is a brief summary and percentage range. The percentage shows a typical range for IT environments that would use that migration pattern. •Rehost – lift-and-shift to capture near term business benefits; transform once migrated for additional value ~30 % to 40 % • Rehost+ - lift-and-upgrade: Window Server upgrade (Windows 16 to Windows 22) ~10 % to 20 % • Replatform – platform optimization (to reduce Operating System / Database licensing costs) ~ 20 % • Rearchitect – Reimagine application architecture and development ~5 % to 10 % • Repurchase – move to SaaS ~10 % to 20 % • Retain – not prioritized for migration ~5 % to 10 % • Retire – no longer needed ~10 % to 20 %

Figure 3: Migration patterns for a typical IT environment

More detailed guidance on prioritization of migrating applications can be found in AWS Prescriptive Guidance: “Application portfolio assessment guide for AWS Cloud migration.”

The next blog post will explain the first pillar of the Cloud Value Framework, Cost Savings.

Each week a blog will be released with direct links added below:

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