Accelerate your cloud migration journey to unlock innovation, increase resiliency, and optimize cost

The ability of businesses to innovate is constantly reshaped by disruptive events and technological advancements. Recent global events, such as the pandemic and the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), have compelled companies across various industries to reevaluate and make crucial strategic pivots. One such move has been the embrace of cloud computing. It’s a transformative shift that offers enterprises many tangible benefits, including enhanced operational efficiency, streamlined processes, and heightened productivity. However, many organizations remain locked into their legacy, on-premises networks because it’s difficult to move to the cloud. There are security concerns, risks to customers, complicated software licensing agreements, and more.

But migrating your services to the cloud doesn’t need to be a daunting task.

In this age of disruption, organizations need to innovate faster to survive and thrive. Migrating your IT infrastructure and operations to the cloud—what AWS calls “undifferentiated heavy lifting”—is a great way to improve cost savings, operational efficiency, scalability, and reduce security risks. With your IT infrastructure and operations on the cloud, you will free up more time to focus on critical business areas. You’ll be able to innovate for your customers, drive better business outcomes, and lead your company ahead of the competition.

According to a recent Gartner study, “By 2028, more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives.” The best way for your company to stay ahead of the curve, according to the same Gartner study, is to use a “business-driven strategy coupled with a pragmatic adoption/migration plan.”

With the right plan and strategy, your organization can avoid the delays or cost overruns that typically put cloud migrations at risk. You can succeed with your cloud migration by building and maintaining momentum in your path to the cloud, and it helps to be armed with the right partners and strategies to see your migration through to completion.

Sustain momentum to complete your cloud journey

Key factors that lead to a successful migration to the cloud include: Executive sponsorship and prioritization of migration; a clear understanding and harmony between IT and business outcomes; a well-defined complete migration strategy and roadmap; and dedicated cloud talent. On the other hand, gaps in these areas, combined with a lack of migration experience, often lead to delayed cloud migrations.

Through our experience of helping thousands of organizations migrate their IT applications and operations to the cloud, AWS has identified patterns of what works in a cloud migration. To support your cloud migration, we bring prescriptive migration guidance, tools and automations, and a variety of programs to optimize your cloud resource needs and costs, along with a global network of vetted partners.

Migration methodologies and frameworks to see your migration to completion

AWS has a prescriptive cloud migration framework that helps organizations systematically migrate hundreds of thousands of workloads to the cloud. This framework is supported by a comprehensive set of migration tools and programs and consists of three phases:

• Assess: The first step is to evaluate your organization’s current preparedness for embracing cloud operations. The most crucial aspect is to clearly define the desired business objectives and build a compelling business case for the migration process.
• Mobilize: During the mobilize phase, you’ll create a migration plan and refine your business case. This involves addressing any gaps or deficiencies in your organization’s readiness that were identified during the assess phase. The primary focus is on establishing a baseline environment, often referred to as the “landing zone,” to ensure operational readiness and cultivate cloud skills within your workforce.
• Migrate & modernize: Migrate your workloads to AWS and put a cloud operating model in place to optimize your cloud environment and applications. Read on for an overview of the tools and services AWS provides to help you complete your migration.

Tools and resources to complete your migration

AWS provides tools and resources that enterprises require to see their migration through to completion. You can transition your business to the cloud with the support of a strong AWS cloud foundation: a proven rapid migration path, reduced risk, and financial assistance that offsets initial migration costs.

AWS tools that enterprises use to streamline their migrations include:

• Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) helps customers accelerate each of these above phases with an outcome-driven methodology.
• AWS Migration Hub Orchestrator automates the migration of your applications with predefined and customizable workflow templates.
• AWS Migration Hub Journeys keeps your projects on track with prescriptive guided migration and modernization for your applications.
• AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) can help reduce licensing costs (save 45% on SQL and 77% on Windows licensing) as part of the migration to AWS.
• Migration Evaluator builds a data-driven business case and save costs as you migrate to AWS.
• AWS Competency Partner program identifies, validates, and promotes AWS Partners with demonstrated technical expertise and proven customer success.

AWS offers vetted partners and proven tools and capabilities to help you quickly and painlessly migrate your applications and legacy infrastructure to AWS. Read on to see how three AWS customers were able to smoothly complete their cloud journeys.

Migrating faster helped these companies grow

The following customer stories show how EVENT, BMC, and Spacelift leveraged AWS to accelerate and complete their migration.

EVENT migrated 142 servers in 6 months

EVT (Entertainment, Ventures, Travel, formerly Event Hospitality and Entertainment, Ltd. or EVENT) operates cinema applications in Australia. Their team needed to digitally transform its backend to better support business expansion and innovation. EVENT began its migration to AWS in September 2020, with a goal of completion by 2021, before its cinemas were slated to reopen post-pandemic lockdown.

Within six months, EVENT migrated 142 servers to AWS: 105 Microsoft Windows Servers, 21 Linux servers, and 16 Microsoft SQL Server databases. As part of this migration, EVENT moved its SQL Server databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and used Amazon FSx for Windows File Server for its storage services.

“We can scale in a heartbeat on AWS and have a level of elasticity we never had before, which is especially valuable in times of uncertainty,” says Peter Bourke, director of IT for EVENT.

In streamlining its operations, the company decreased its recovery time objective (RTO) from 60 minutes to 60 seconds. Now, instead of allocating resources to disaster recovery, EVENT focuses on innovating on behalf of its customers.

BMC migrated one year sooner than anticipated

BMC Software (BMC), a member of the AWS Partner Network, provides automation, operations, and service management solutions to enterprise organizations. BMC faced difficulty scaling its business, as it was spending resources to manage and maintain its own data centers.

BMC used the Amazon Database Migration Accelerator (DMA) advisory service to accelerate the migration of its SQL Server databases to Amazon Aurora. Within roughly three months, BMC deployed the Aurora service to 105 of its customers.

Venky Ravipati, Head of SaaS Operations and the database and service teams at BMC, explains, “Without those automations, we could not have migrated customers so quickly. It would’ve taken one year longer without the support of the Amazon DMA team.” Ravipati also went on to explain, “Manually migrating 700 database instances within our timeline would have been impossible.”

BMC engineers are 60–70% more productive after migrating workloads to AWS because they no longer have to spend their time maintaining databases and solving performance issues. Moreover, BMC saw a 42% decrease in infrastructure costs, in addition to the cost savings realized by having no more SQL Server licensing fees.

Spacelift built its platform in half the expected time

Spacelift helps businesses set up and manage complex cloud environments, so that their customers can do more with fewer team members. Its platform combines continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes to manage infrastructure as code.

The company built its system on AWS from day one and was up and running in just four months—twice as fast as Spacelift had estimated. “We moved so quickly thanks to help from the AWS support teams and the AWS Activate program,” says Marcin Wyszynski, founder and chief product officer at Spacelift. “We were able to quickly verify product assumptions, and the support team helped us to get key functionalities right.”

Using AWS, Spacelift has helped customers like Checkout.com and Kin to cut repetitive infrastructure maintenance tasks by 90 percent. Automation allows customers to reduce the time spent managing security and data privacy configurations by a factor of ten.

Take the next step

In this post, we showed how AWS has helped companies offload “the undifferentiated heavy lifting,” helping them achieve improved business agility, accelerated innovation, and significant cost savings. With the AWS migration framework and tools to support your journey to the cloud, you too can remove many of the risks and potential cost overruns of your migration.

Strong executive participation is an essential part of cloud migration. Key leaders create change through strategic planning and empowering organizational leaders. For more information, see our white paper with executive guidance for decision making and engagement to help launch your organization’s cloud migration.

To get started with your migration or take the next step to accelerate the migration of your workloads to the cloud, get in touch with our team or join the conversation in the comments. We’d love to help you on your cloud journey.

Contact us to start—or finish—your migration and modernization journey today.

About the Author