The AWS Migration Assessment from CirrusHQ empowers educational institutions to start their move to AWS on the right foot. In changing times for the sector, it provides the key building blocks required to create a successful business plan for AWS cloud adoption.

Across workshops and evaluation of your existing workloads and infrastructure, CirrusHQ works with your teams and AWS to produce a unique and detailed report that serves as the foundation for successful AWS adoption.

From defining total cost of ownership to providing guidance on right-sizing your existing estate to lower ongoing costs, our experts provide you with a clear picture of your ideal target landscape and the path to achieving it. Designed to prepare your organisation for the next critical migration stages, this readiness assessment is the perfect starting point for educational institutions seeking to adapt and compete through modernisation in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Combat ongoing industry challenges

Across the industry, IT teams are facing disruption and increasing challenges, driving an urgent need for change. In most cases, this will include a desire to achieve one or more of the following:

• Enhancing and managing security to mitigate malicious attacks
• Overcoming the constraints and costs of existing infrastructure by moving from a CapEx to an OpEx model in the cloud
• Modernising ageing applications and/or servers
• Bridging the skills gap to successfully adopt AWS and ensure ongoing cloud management
• Responding to the step changes in learning approaches by enhancing technology agility, flexibility and performance

Achieve successful cloud adoption with expert support

While all the above outcomes can be achieved in the cloud, it is essential to develop a solid foundation and migration strategy to ensure successful cloud adoption for your organisation. With a proven track record of delivering key assessments and shaping the business justification for cloud migration, CirrusHQ has helped customers across the education sector. For instance, we helped Nottingham College migrate its backups to AWS during a ransomware attack. We also assisted Whiterose Maths in migrating to AWS when the pandemic drove unprecedented usage of its learning platform.

Create a strong foundation for your migration

To begin defining your business case, we work with your key teams to fully understand your needs and goals. Through a series of workshops, we will identify and understand:

• The applications, servers and workloads in scope
• Your organisation, its people and how it operates
• Your key requirements and constraints

We will use our migration tooling to evaluate your current landscape and determine the total cost of ownership when migrated to AWS. We will ensure that the target landscape aligns with your needs while taking into consideration your applications, internal skills and overall cloud readiness. On completion of our assessment, you will receive a comprehensive business report that includes:

• Total cost of ownership of your workloads on AWS
• Cost comparison between your current infrastructure and target landscape over 3 and 5 years
• Advice on right-sizing and cost to maximise the cloud readiness of key workloads
• Operational models
• An outline of the key responsibilities and skills required
• A target landscape diagram

Prepare your organisation for the future of education

By building your business drivers into your business plan, this end-to-end assessment from CirrusHQ provides you with the knowledge you need to make the right migration decisions. During the assessment, we will work closely with AWS to ensure the information you receive is timely and cost-effective in order to fully prepare you for the crucial next stages of your migration.

Using the assessment findings to outline a solid business case for migration, you can not only justify and achieve business buy-in for the move to AWS but ensure you’re prepared to begin migrating workloads as soon as sign-off is achieved.

Thanks to incentives from AWS, you could potentially access funding to heavily reduce the cost of this assessment or even make it entirely cost neutral, depending on your existing estate and goals.

When your organisation is ready to take the next step and begin migrating workloads to AWS, CirrusHQ will be ready to support you. Working hand-in-hand with our migration assessment, the following additional products enable your organisation to turn its planned migration into reality:

• AWS Migration Foundations and Mobilisation for Education Fully prepare your organisation for migration with detailed planning, training and pilot application migration.

• AWS Migrate and Modernise for Education Full migration of your workloads to AWS delivered to agreed milestones with a full transition plan, training and knowledge transfer included.