Crayon Helps MID Achieve up to 40% Cost Savings Using AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment

MID, a software company and IT consultancy based in Germany, needed to migrate to the cloud to bring scalability and greater resilience to its technical infrastructure. But before it made the move, it asked AWS Partner Crayon to assess its existing on-premises server usage with an AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment. This analysis has helped MID identify the best strategy for its planned migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

MID is a software company and an IT consultancy based in Germany. It provides its clients with specialist software to help them run more efficiently. MID is both a consultancy and a software provider, producing its own software and running a number of data centers.

MID was approaching a contract renewal with its existing on-premises provider, so it naturally wanted to discover what its options were. Should it continue with on-premises? Was it making the best use of its existing servers? Should it move to a hyperscale cloud service, such as AWS?

The cost of maintaining and managing its on-premises servers was high, and visibility into the overall efficiency of its infrastructure was limited. “We had concerns about the ongoing reliability and resilience of our servers,” says Jürgen Schmidtlein, head of IT at MID. “We’re a software vendor ourselves, so we need infrastructure we can trust.”

MID turned to AWS Partner Crayon to provide advice and expert support on migrating to AWS. “We chose AWS, but since our technical team has not had much experience with AWS, we needed external expertise to help us. Crayon has been a great partner,” says Schmidtlein.

A key question for the migration team was whether it would be better to replicate functionality wholesale in a simple lift-and-shift migration or whether there’d be better results from right-sizing at the same time. MID was looking to modernize its own ways of working and considered migrating all its services to the cloud. “In the last 5 years, we moved from being a software company and a consultancy to a cloud SaaS provider and a consultancy,” says Schmidtlein. “Our infrastructure was aging, and maintenance costs were high. What’s more, the post-COVID shift to remote working means we began to see the clear advantage of the public cloud.”

To help MID make an informed decision on how to proceed, Crayon used the AWS Optimization Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA) methodology to assess its current on-premises and cloud environment. “We’re experienced at helping organizations analyze their IT estate and create a roadmap to future success,” says Dr. Or Sela, channel account manager at Crayon. “MID has taken a very smart approach. They want to make data-driven decisions. The AWS OLA process means they will be well-informed as they take their next steps.”

Crayon’s AWS OLA helped MID understand what servers it was using and what they were being used for. The AWS OLA methodology analyzes actual resource utilization, third-party licensing, and application dependencies, giving MID a complete overview of its servers.

Using Migration Evaluator, which helps build a data-driven business case for AWS, Crayon assessed and collected utilization data of a significant subset of the customer's servers and SQL database servers, including the attached storage, over the agreed period of 5 weeks. The AWS OLA assessment found that 25 percent of MID’s 158 on-premises servers were not being used, and 75 percent were averaging less than 10 percent CPU and RAM usage. In addition, MID’s servers weren’t fully optimized—meaning a migration to AWS using a right-sized dedicated host with a 3-year reservation would result in up to 40 percent total cost savings for MID. “We presented five different cost scenarios to help MID choose the best option for its compute and storage requirements,” says Dr. Sela. “Our analysis identified up to 46 percent cost saving for compute and up to 18 percent for storage.”
 
After a thorough analysis of the collected data and mapping of the scanned servers to AWS instances, Crayon presented the business case. This included several AWS cost models highlighting the savings potential that can be achieved through right-sizing, including best-fit choices for business, administrative, and technology benefits. Based on the business case, MID could prioritize the workloads to be migrated to managed container services on AWS, and an initial test workload was identified.

Crayon identified the over-provisioning and the zombie servers (non-active machines) in the on-premises environment, which allowed MID to identify savings when right-sizing its environment to AWS. It has also helped MID build a migration and licensing strategy to unlock further cost savings when it migrates.

The two companies built a close technical relationship. Crayon provided MID with the skills and confidence in AWS and in the planned migration due to take place in the near future. “It’s important to have a trusted expert partner like Crayon to help discuss new ideas and innovations,” says Schmidtlein. “They’ve been a highly professional technical and business partner.”

The migration promises a future of increased organizational agility that is essential for MID. The company builds apps and services for its clients and therefore needs a fast, flexible, and scalable infrastructure to build on. AWS will deliver that, while Crayon acts as technical partner to help MID’s IT department focus on client-facing work. “Once we have migrated to AWS, our developers will have more time to focus on important client-focused work without getting distracted by infrastructure maintenance work,” says Schmidtlein. “They don’t want to be installing hard drives, they want to get on with client work that really matters.”