AWS Public Sector Blog

Microsoft Windows on AWS: How to Bring Microsoft Apps to AWS

When you plan your data center migration to the cloud, it’s critical to consider how workloads will run for maximum performance and availability. With Microsoft applications making up 60% or more of most on-premises data centers, more and more public sector customers are moving their Microsoft workloads to AWS to improve performance, increase availability, and improve their security posture.

One of our customers, Kaplan, was running 12 different data centers across the organization and started moving its applications to AWS to consolidate its infrastructure. As part of the move to the cloud, Kaplan migrated approximately 50 applications and 50 nested sub-applications in its stack. Kaplan was attracted to the maturity of AWS offerings.

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) allows our DBA team to focus less on day-to-day maintenance and use their time to work on enhancements. And Elastic Load Balancing has allowed us to move away from expensive and complicated load balancers and retain the required functionality,” said Chad Marino, Executive Director of Technology Services at Kaplan. Read the story.

Another example is Macmillan Learning. Macmillan Learning moved its flagship digital learning application, LaunchPad, to AWS, running on 90 Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with a mix of Linux and Windows servers, in front of Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) storage volumes. They can now scale to support three times the number of users, while releasing new application features faster using AWS.

Watch this webinar to learn how you can achieve greater customization, availability, and scalability by bringing Microsoft Apps to AWS.

To help our customers with a seamless transition, we also cover planning in order of operations for migrating Microsoft applications to AWS, including:

  • Common architectural patterns for moving Microsoft applications, such as SQL Server
  • How to integrate the migration with Active Directory
  • Different options for Microsoft on AWS licensing

Download the slides here.

Need help figuring out your Windows strategy or finding resources or partners? Join us for office hours on Friday, August 24th from 2-4pm EDT (Meeting ID: 3918 02 3955 or dial in: United States Toll-Free: +1 855-552-4463, Meeting PIN: 3918 02 3955).