Announcing the AWS Well-Architected Mergers and Acquisitions Lens

We are delighted to announce the release of the Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Lens. The M&A Lens consists of a Mergers and Acquisitions Lens whitepaper and an AWS-created lens available in the new Lens Catalog of the AWS Well-Architected Tool (AWS WA Tool). The AWS Well-Architected Framework provides a consistent approach to evaluate architectures and implement scalable designs. The AWS Well-Architected Framework enables architects and developers to build secure, high-performance, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for applications and workloads.

Using the lens in the AWS WA Tool’s Lens Catalog, you can directly assess your workload in the console, and produce a set of actionable results for customized improvement plans recommended by the tool.

The M&A Lens offers implementation guidance you can use during your technical integration process. You can use the M&A Lens as a foundation across multiple organizations to integrate your IT resources based on AWS Well-Architected best practices.

For more information on AWS Well-Architected Lenses, refer to AWS Well-Architected.

What’s in the Mergers and Acquisitions Lens?

The Mergers and Acquisitions Lens is a collection of customer-proven design principles, best practices, and prescriptive guidance to help you integrate the IT systems of two or more organizations. This lens helps companies follow AWS prescribed best practices during technical integration, drive cost optimization, and expedite merger and acquisition value realization. This guidance drives architectural qualities that layer M&A specific best practices. These recommendations are based on insights that AWS has gathered from customers, AWS Partners, and our own analytics technical specialist communities.

This lens covers the following topics:

• IT integration design principles
• Guidance on workload discovery and analysis for migration to AWS
• Guidance on managing technical debt, modernization, and compliance
• Business integration scenario use cases
• Links to updated blogs and product documentation, partner solutions, training content, and how-to videos

The lens highlights the most common areas for assessment and improvement. It’s designed to align with and provide insights across the six pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework:

• Operational excellence – Includes the ability to support development and run workloads effectively, gain insight into your operations, and continually improve supporting processes and procedures to deliver business value.
• Security – Includes the ability to protect data, systems, and assets to take advantage of cloud technologies to improve your security.
• Reliability – Includes the ability of a system to automatically recover from infrastructure or service disruptions, dynamically acquire computing resources to meet demand, and mitigate disruptions such as misconfiguration or transient network issues.
• Performance efficiency – Includes the efficient use of computing resources to meet requirements and the maintenance of that efficiency as demand changes and technologies evolve.
• Cost optimization – Includes the continual process of system refinement and improvement over the entire lifecycle to optimize cost, from the initial design of your first proof of concept to the ongoing operation of production workloads.
• Sustainability – Includes minimizing the environmental impacts of running cloud workloads. Topics including benchmarking, trading data accuracy for carbon, encouraging a data minimization culture, implementing data retention processes, optimizing data modeling, preventing unnecessary data movement, and efficiently managing analytics infrastructure.

Who should use the Mergers and Acquisitions Lens?

The MA Lens is intended for those involved in the M&A technical integration planning process, such as CTOs, architects, MA leads, and other integrators. After reading this document, you should understand AWS best practices and strategies to apply when preparing to integrate two technical environments.

Conclusion

Applying the M&A Lens to your existing architectures can contribute to a successful integration of the acquired businesses and meeting your desired business outcomes.

For more information about building your own Well-Architected systems using the M&A Lens, see the Mergers and Acquisitions Lens whitepaper. For information about the new Lens, see the AWS Well Architected Tool and Lens Catalog briefs. If you require additional expert guidance, contact your AWS account team to engage a Specialist Solutions Architect.

To learn more about workload migration solutions, customer case studies, and additional resources, refer to Strategy and best practices for AWS Migrations.

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