Innovate, evolve, thrive
Explore how AWS can help accelerate your
business through a digital transformation
business through a digital transformation
Why
Why are organisations moving
to AWS to transform their
businesses
to AWS to transform their
businesses
Using AWS to digitally transform your business goes well beyond just the traditional benefits. If handled right, some of the biggest benefits will see include retiring technical debt and boosting your innovation.
Why technical debt matters
Over time, on-premises systems build workarounds, inefficiencies and quick fixes that add up to significant technical debt. They save time in the short term, but in the long run they can be seriously detrimental to your team, and your business limiting velocity and the ability to innovate.
By retiring technical debt you're simplifying workloads and cutting inefficient workloads that have accumulated. You also reduce the risk of disruption: AWS Cloud customers see an average of 94 percent less unplanned downtime. This cuts your IT teams' burden significantly, freeing up time and resources to pursue new projects and focus on the things that create value for your business.
A more modern IT infrastructure enables businesses to work on strategic initiatives, and make smarter investments - which adds to the potential for business growth.
Ultimately, more technology can be a help and not a hindrance to innovation.
Why innovation
It's impossible to overstate the importance of innovation.
Failure to innovate means your business risks falling
behind the competition, whatever your business.
The problem is that, traditionally, innovation has also been
really difficult and expensive.
Building new tools from scratch, implementing new ideas,
and experimenting on your own is resource-intensive and
requires a lot of time. Plus there's the chance that, at the
end of it, you might not have much to show for your investment.
requires a lot of time. Plus there's the chance that, at the
end of it, you might not have much to show for your investment.
Innovation can also be hard to define. For some
businesses, it means developing new products or services.
Others might focus on personalising customer journeys.
For some, the priority will be new market entry.
Whatever your definition, what you need is a smarter,
easier way to innvoate.
And the good news is that's exactly where the AWS Cloud
can help.
Why innovation
It's impossible to overstate the importance of innovation.Failure to innovate means your business risks fallingbehind the competition, whatever your business.
The problem is that, traditionally, innovation has also beenreally difficult - and expensive.
Building new tools from scratch, implementing new ideas,and experimenting on your own is resource-intensive. Plusthere's the chance that, at the end of it, you might nothave much to show for your investment.
Innovation can also be hard to define. For somebusinesses, it means developing new products or services.Others might focus on personalising customer journeys.For some, the priority will be new market entry.
Whatever your definition, what you need is a smarter,easier way to innvoate.
And the good news is that's exactly where the AWS Cloudcan help.
TUI accelerates its digital transformation
"AWS enables us to use machine learning
to create a responsive experience for our
customers, even on a cruise ship in the
middle of the sea."
Pieter Jordaan
Director IT Engineering, UK & Ireland
The advantages of embracing innovation
We help businesses around the world to find better, more
innovative ways of working but innovation means different
things to different organisations.
things to different organisations.
For some, it means achieving lower costs and faster
turnaround times, or more efficient product development
cycles. Customers who move to
AWS deliver an average of
they did without AWS.
Others use it in new ways to create seamless customer
experiences, to manage predictive maintenance of IoT-
connected equipment, or to improve fraud detection
within their systems.
And some take that potential and use it to change the
world in ways that were impossible before cloud
computing.
But whatever the goal of your innovation, the AWS Cloud
will help you maximise your chances of success.
The advantages of embracing innovation
AWS helps businesses around the world to find better, more innovative ways of working but innovation means different things to different organisations.
For some, it means achieving lower costs and faster turnaround times, or more efficient product development cycles. Customers who move to AWS deliver an average of almost three times more features (such as applications),and they deliver these features 42 percent faster than they did without AWS.
Others use it in new ways to create seamless customer experiences, to manage predictive maintenance of IoT-connected equipment, or to improve fraud detection within their systems.
And some take that potential and use it to change the world in ways that were impossible before cloud computing.
But whatever the goal of your innovation, the AWS Cloud will help you maximise your chances of success.
Art of the Pivot
You don’t need to be a small company to be nimble, and you don’t have to be a young company to transform the way you work. Large organisations are learning that with the best cloud technology and the right support, even a dramatic pivot can be fast, affordable and secure.
What
Key areas for your business to migrate
The path to the cloud is unique for every business. Resources,
priorities, and expected outcomes will all be different.
Many organisations find that a good place to start is one of these three business-critical apps:
-
SAP
-
VMware
-
Microsoft
-
SAP
-
SAP workloads are some of the most critical business applications. You can’t take any risks with them.The resilience, security, and efficiency of the AWS means that we offer a way to reduce risks and get your systems set up sooner rather than later.At AWS we’ve been SAP certified since 2011 (and SAP have trusted us to handle their own workloads since 2008).It’s a great place to start for cost savings, with 96 percent of customers migrating SAP to the AWS Cloud reporting a reduction in total cost of ownership, saving an average of 25 percent.Want to start here? Check out our Whitepaper.
-
VMware
-
Enterprises have reluctant traditionally to move virtual machines from the data center to the cloud for fear of losing capabilities. They lacked a reliable, seamless migration option.VMware Cloud on AWS offers this to organisations, helping them to bring their private VMware cloud into the global infrastructure and breadth of services offered by AWS.Compliance is simplified, costs are more predictable, existing licenses can be used, and your people can continue to use the interfaces they’re familiar with.
Find out more with our guide. -
Microsoft
-
Many organisations run on Microsoft technology—the MS Office suite is the de facto standard in enterprise productivity programs.Which is why future-proofing your Windows workloads by migrating them to the cloud is a critical job.We’re a Microsoft Gold Certified Hosting Partner. In fact, we were the first cloud environment to ever host a Microsoft application.Since then we’ve had hundreds of thousands of customers run their Microsoft workloads through us, covering every Microsoft application.AWS has an active Premier Support agreement with Microsoft, meaning that customers who host their Microsoft workloads on AWS receive support from both AWS and Microsoft.If this is where you want to start your journey, take a look at our guide.
How
12 steps to make your cloud journey a success
Big shifts in the way we work often bring
complexity and risk, but the good news is
you can minimise these with a clear and
logical roadmap for your AWS Cloud journey.
Read these 12 steps to simplify your move to the cloud.
1. Just start
It's easy to postpone the first step of a long
journey. That's why we make the first push as
simple as possible. Why not give one developer
access to the AWS Cloud so that they can try out
the system? It can take as little as three seconds to
get started.
2. Empower a single-threaded leader
Once your initial investigations prove successful,
you’ll want to start scaling up your migration efforts.
The next step is to appoint a single-threaded
leader—someone dedicated to ensuring your
migration is a success.
3. Build a two-pizza cloud business office
To move forward productively, make sure there
aren’t too many stakeholders in any one meeting.
Build a team that’s big enough to give every critical
team a representative, but small enough to meet
the two-pizza rule—that is, you won’t need more
than two pizzas to feed everyone.
4. Establish your tenets
Tenets provide a common frame of reference for
everyone to understand the ‘how’ questions that
can arise. Get input from everyone, but keep the
final list of tenets small to make it as effective as
possible. Then stay flexible enough to react as new
ideas arise.
5. Create a ‘questions parking lot’
To handle the scale, complexity, and cross-discipline
nature of your migration, create a central depository
for questions—a ‘parking lot’. This allows you to
group questions logically, cut duplicates, and
source answers efficiently. Some might be best
answered in-house, or you can
contact our experts
6. Create a two-pizza cloud engineering team
Just like the business team, keep your
engineering team small—a maximum of 12 people.
That should give you access to all the expertise you
need, but still keep the team focused and lean.
7. Bring in a partner or AWS ProServe
“There’s no compression algorithm for experience.”
—Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS
There’s no way to get around the need for expertise.
If you don’t have that experience in-house and
aren’t yet working with a partner, see how
AWS ProServe or one of our
certified partners
can help you.
8. Get clear on your objectives
There are many important things you might
want to achieve by moving to the cloud—like
savings, security, compliance, availability. But if
you want your team to make the right decisions
as you migrate, set a clear objective, and prioritise it.
9. Ship something to production that
is important, but not critical
When it comes to putting something into
production, it should be something important
so the team take it as more than just a test,
but not something so critical to the company
that you endanger the entire move too early.
10. Train, gain experience, and certify your teams
Trained teams are 80 percent faster* at adopting the
cloud, and they can achieve a lot more with it.
Taking the time to
train your team early will pay
huge dividends in the long run.
11. Start migrating
When you’re ready to migrate, set a realistic
deadline then constantly evaluate and optimise
as you go. That will give you an incentive to
move forward, but give you the time needed
to test everything and minimise errors. There are
a
host of migration automation tools to help your
team, and partners who can handle a lot of the
work for you.
12. Trust, but verify
Enterprises need to balance control and innovation,
and trusting employees to access new systems is a
big part of this. Having strong protocols and systems
in place on who has access—and where from—lets
you trust your employees while keeping your
infrastructure secure.
Read these 12 steps to simplify your move to the cloud.
1. Just start
It's easy to postpone the first step of a long
journey. That's why we make the first push as
simple as possible. Why not give one developer
access to the AWS Cloud so that they can try out
the system? It can take as little as three seconds to
get started.
2. Empower a single-threaded leader
Once your initial investigations prove successful,
you’ll want to start scaling up your migration efforts.
The next step is to appoint a single-threaded
leader—someone dedicated to ensuring your
migration is a success.
3. Build a two-pizza cloud business office
To move forward productively, make sure there
aren’t too many stakeholders in any one meeting.
Build a team that’s big enough to give every critical
team a representative, but small enough to meet
the two-pizza rule—that is, you won’t need more
than two pizzas to feed everyone.
4. Establish your tenets
Tenets provide a common frame of reference for
everyone to understand the ‘how’ questions that
can arise. Get input from everyone, but keep the
final list of tenets small to make it as effective as
possible. Then stay flexible enough to react as new
ideas arise.
5. Create a ‘questions parking lot’
To handle the scale, complexity, and cross-discipline
nature of your migration, create a central depository
for questions—a ‘parking lot’. This allows you to
group questions logically, cut duplicates, and
source answers efficiently. Some might be best
answered in-house, or you can contact our experts
for guidance.
6. Create a two-pizza cloud engineering team
Just like the business team, keep your
engineering team small—a maximum of 12 people.
That should give you access to all the expertise you
need, but still keep the team focused and lean.
7. Bring in a partner or AWS ProServe
“There’s no compression algorithm for experience.”
— Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS
There’s no way to get around the need for expertise.
If you don’t have that experience in-house andaren’t yet
working with a partner, see howAWS ProServe or one of
our certified partnerscan help you.
8. Get clear on your objectives
There are many important things you might
want to achieve by moving to the cloud—like
savings, security, compliance, availability. But if
you want your team to make the right decisions
as you migrate, set a clear objective, and prioritise it.
9. Ship something to production that
is important, but not critical
When it comes to putting something into
production, it should be something important
so the team take it as more than just a test,
but not something so critical to the company
that you endanger the entire move too early.
10. Train, gain experience, and certify your teams
Trained teams are 80 percent faster at adopting the
cloud, and they can achieve a lot more with it.
Taking the time to
train your team early will pay
huge dividends in the long run.
11. Start migrating
When you’re ready to migrate, set a realistic
deadline then constantly evaluate and optimise
as you go. That will give you an incentive to move
forward, but give you the time needed to test
everything and minimise errors. There are a
host of migration automation tools to help your
team, and partners who can handle a lot of the
work for you.
12. Trust, but verify
Enterprises need to balance control and innovation,
and trusting employees to access new systems is a
big part of this. Having strong protocols and systems
in place on who has access—and where from—lets
you trust your employees while keeping your
infrastructure secure.
Who
AWS Cloud can help to make
your migration a success
AWS provides a broad and deep set of integrated services in the cloud -
partners to help your migration, training to give your employees the skills
to help you thrive, and tools to make the whole process more efficient.
We offer the tools and people to support your journey to the cloud, and
help you unlock the benefits it offers.
Here are some resources to help you get started:
Get help from our comprehensive network of partners, from consulting to technology.
We have experienced delivery partners with EMEA operations that can help your business get the most out of the AWS Cloud, and deliver on your specific cloud objectives.
We have a global team of experts who specialise in helping businesses get the most from their cloud migration. They work with you to achieve your desired outcomes efficiently, and in a realistic timeframe.
Our expertise covers a wide variety of solutions, technologies, and industries, so we can offer the support you need.
You can bring in new staff to handle the shift. But the reality is that training your existing team is faster, more scalable, and less expensive. We provide training, either in a classroom or online, making it flexible for your workforce to learn at their own pace. It’s not limited to just cloud migration either—we can help bring wider cloud skills to your business that will continue to unlock the full potential of the cloud once you’re ready for the next steps.
How to successfully scale your talent transformation
Jon sets out the 12 steps to successfully scale your talent when moving to the cloud. One of the most important steps is upskilling existing employees, and Jon tells us how getting just 10% of your team certified could make a company-wide difference.
IDC: Train to Accelerate Your Cloud Strategy
Our cloud adoption research showed that training in cloud-based computing helped organizations accelerate cloud adoption and achieve business objectives sooner.
We also found that comprehensive training yielded greater organizational benefits than minimal or no cloud training.
Tools
We've put together a comprehensive
Move from separate strategies for business and
IT to a business model that integrates IT strategy
Help Human Resources and personnel
management prepare for cloud adoption
Integrate IT Governance and Organisational
Governance
Tools
We've put together a comprehensive
- Move from separate strategies for business and IT to a business model that integrates IT strategy
- Help Human Resources and personnel management prepare for cloud adoption
- Integrate IT Governance and Organisational Governance
We've also created the
AWS Migration Acceleration
Program (MAP). This provides consulting support,
training, and services credits to reduce the risk of
migrating to the cloud, help you build a strong operational
foundation, and offset the initial cost of migration.
It includes a migration methodology for executing legacy
migrations, as well as a robust set of tools to automate
and accelerate common migration scenarios.
AWS Marketplace
This is where AWS customers find, try, buy, and sell cloud products. The functions they cover include: Security, Networking, Storage, DevOps and much more.
These offer pre-built options for many of the scenarios your business may
encounter on its cloud journey, allowing faster implementation and
reducing in-house build time.
If you want to get started with the AWS Cloud, our
solutions in AWS Marketplace could be a great first step to see what tools are on offer for you.
Contact us
Interested in learning more?
We're here to help you move your business forward.