The BJSS Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA) gives you the tools needed to assess and optimise your current on-premises and cloud environments based on actual resource utilisation, third-party licensing, and application dependencies. This allows you to build a migration and licensing strategy to unlock cost savings by transitioning to AWS.

The BJSS Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA) will help you save costs on AWS EC2 by creating a list of your computing resources and finding out your real usage needs. It will then help you choose the best AWS EC2 instance size and type for each workload based on the lowest cost. We will help you use this data to determine the right blend of on-demand, spot instances, dedicated hosts, savings plan, and other options tailored to your unique requirements. In addition, we will look at your existing licensing entitlements by configuring your instances to require fewer licenses while still maintaining highly performant applications. Through a no-cost assessment of your owned licenses, The BJSS OLA will show you what can be migrated and what costs can be reduced by exploring flexible licensing options.

Why is it important

Licensing is often overlooked when planning a migration. Software licensing is often complex, requiring in-depth expertise to be licensed correctly and efficiently.

Over 55% of businesses rank understanding the implications of licensing costs as the biggest-software related challenge in the cloud. This is why it’s best to evaluate your current cost vs usage before you begin your migration plan.

A recent report conducted from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) shows that, on average, customers can save 77% on Windows Server and 45% on SQL Server licensing cost. It also showed that first party license costs represent an average of 3 times the compute, storage, and networking cost on AWS. License costs are a significant part of the total cloud TCO and need to be taken in consideration when costs are an important factor in your customers migration to the cloud.

Our approach?

Scope workloads First, we will work with you and your team to determine the scope of the assessment. This will include the location of the workloads. For example, on premises workloads migrating to AWS, workloads already in AWS (OLA for EC2), or running in other cloud providers.

Data collection Next, we will deploy tooling to help with resource discovery and collecting performance data from your servers. This tooling comes in three deployment options.

• Agentless discovery (via SSH, WinRM, WMI depending on environment and OS)
• Agents can be deployed on physical or virtual machines
• Flat file data collection and analysis

Analyse BJSS team members will review the data to summarise and make recommendations which are beneficial considerations for on premises usage as well as cloud migration. Compute and licensing spend is reduced by examining consolidation opportunities, elasticity gains (where workloads can be turned off or seasonally adjusted), right-sku opportunities (SQL Server Enterprise Edition in use, but resource requirements and feature usage suggest SQL Server Standard Edition is fine). For products like SQL Server which are licensed by the core, it often makes financial sense to place workloads in a more expensive compute instance if the CPU profile and ratio of RAM to vCPU serves a net effect to reduce the number of licensed cores.

Plan Upon license analysis completion, performance data is used to estimate specific workloads sizing and cost, or to look in aggregate at the environment in total and provide quantitative analysis if the best option is on premises refresh or AWS. A cloud economic business case can be constructed utilising the TCO analysis summary provided at the end of an Optimisation and Licensing Assessment.

OLA also offers a glimpse into the impact modernisation can have on your existing workloads by making suggestions like:

• Moving to a Linux operating system
• Adding application support for ARM processors (graviton)
• Moving SQL Server workloads to Amazon Aurora
• Removing software assurance by moving Windows and SQL server workloads to open-source technologies

What deliverables a customer expect to get?

Quick Insights Report – part of the Migration Evaluator tool deliverable

• A one-page summary highlights the estimated savings to re-host on AWS based on usage patterns with costs broken down by infrastructure and software licenses.
• The Quick Insights Report is a pdf generated within the first 48 hours of data collection.

Directional Business Case

• On-premises inventory overview
• Customised cost model scenarios
• Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA) with Windows/SQL Server licensing optimisation analysis
• Additional data insights and next steps