Accelerating Migration at Scale Using AWS Application Migration Service with 3M Company

3M is a global manufacturing company, producing products from adhesives to medical supplies to industrial abrasives, all with the mission to use science to improve lives and solve tough customer challenges. With corporate operations in 70 countries and sales in over 200, 3M needed greater scalability than was available using its on-premises data centers. There were long lead times for procuring and deploying hardware, making it difficult for 3M to meet the demands of existing workloads and slowing down new projects. 3M required greater stability and sustainability, neither of which the aging data center could provide.

3M kicked off its 3M Cloud Transformation Program in 2020 to complete a migration at scale to AWS. “The promise of the cloud—and what we achieved after we migrated to AWS—was the ability to flexibly scale and deploy with a very short lead time,” says Kyle Hammer, director of cloud transformation at 3M. To complete its migration at scale, 3M began working alongside AWS Professional Services, a global team of experts that can help organizations realize desired business outcomes using AWS, to plan a migration. “Working alongside AWS Professional Services went very well,” says Hammer. “This migration would not have been successful in the time that we had allotted without the strong collaboration from AWS and AWS Professional Services.”

The 3M Cloud Transformation Program began with 8 months of designing and planning, followed by 24 months of migration at scale. 3M completed the transformation program with minimal downtime in 24 months with 51 waves, delivering 2,200 existing enterprise applications to AWS in addition to hundreds of other new instances and applications that were in development in that time frame. “We worked alongside AWS Professional Services to develop a solid plan that had the appropriate governance and controls in place so that we could review, flex, build, and scale to meet the migration needs,” says Hammer. “Through that methodology, we could adjust the technical processes and react quickly to keep the program on track and continue to deliver our migration at scale.” The end state of the migration included over 6,200 instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—a service that provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload—and petabytes of data migrated to other AWS services.

To perform the migration, 3M used tools such as AWS Application Migration Service, which minimizes time-intensive, error-prone manual processes by automating the conversion of source servers to run natively on AWS. AWS Application Migration Service also simplifies application modernization with built-in and custom-optimization options. 3M also used AWS DataSync, a secure, online service that automates and accelerates moving data between on-premises and AWS storage services. Using these tools, 3M could replicate its workloads from on premises to AWS with minimal changes. 3M migrated some workloads that required more creative, flexible work-around capabilities, and using AWS tools, it could address those challenges as they arose. “We were able to maintain the pace that we needed even with those diverse workloads across many different systems,” says Hammer. After each wave of the migration, the company also took time to thoroughly and thoughtfully evaluate how the migration was going. “We captured data in each wave, and that data would help remediate challenges in subsequent migrations,” says Hammer. “That process was helpful for us to mitigate risk and improve the delivery.”

The migration at scale moved at significant speed. At one point, the team moved 500 applications in around 12 hours. Perhaps even more impressively, 3M’s largest and most critical workload—its enterprise resource planning solution, which included hundreds of terabytes of data and hundreds of applications—was cutover in under 20 hours. That solution was migrated to SAP on AWS, which offers proven approaches backed by expert experience supporting SAP customers in the cloud on AWS. “The speed and consistency in delivering our workloads to the cloud was truly a benefit of 3M working alongside AWS in our migration at scale,” says Hammer. “When we looked at the challenge that was presented to us—30 months or fewer to migrate nearly all our enterprise workloads from our aging data center to the cloud—the combined effort between 3M, AWS Professional Services, and other AWS engineering teams made that possible. We were able to hit our milestones and migrate our workloads; we reduced risks and, in many cases, introduced better capabilities using AWS, which provided the scalability and flexibility and resiliency that we didn’t have in the data center.”

3M is automating server builds in the cloud using the AWS interface. Now, users within 3M can build and deploy resources on AWS in minutes, compared to weeks or even months on premises. 3M is also using automation to correctly size compute instances for workloads and to schedule compute only when needed. “On AWS, we no longer need to run many of our systems 24 hours a day, like we used to do in our data center,” says Hammer. “That’s resulted in millions of dollars in compute savings from what we initially migrated to the cloud.” 3M is also optimizing its storage and backups, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in its storage rightsizing efforts alone.