Agile IT through AWS: get the most value from your cloud migration

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Agile IT through AWS: get the most value from your cloud migration

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a leading public cloud provider. Organisations use AWS infrastructure to build scalable applications and have more capacity. It makes them agile. Agility gives them the opportunity to innovate and lead the market.

AWS offers the opportunity to operate on an infrastructure that offers more capacity than NASA. It is logical that more and more organisations are choosing AWS. Besides the technical benefits, migrating to AWS makes your IT agile.

After all, to become agile as an organisation, IT needs to move with you. IT agility determines how quickly and effectively the IT infrastructure can respond to changing circumstances. It lets companies respond to opportunities more easily. With AWS, you can work towards agile IT by automating repetitive manual tasks, among other things. It saves time, prevents human error and ensures a consistent IT infrastructure. Employees can focus on innovation and shared goals.

What does AWS offer your organisation?

  • Use as much data as you want and scale up easily, without worrying about interruptions. Moreover, AWS is a solid place to store information and workloads. You reduce downtime by about 94 per cent.
  • AWS works with pay-per-use. It makes increasing data volume very easy. You only pay for what is used, to conveniently accommodate peaks and seasonality. As a business, you never pay more than you need.
  • AWS helps every organisation operate cost-effectively. Infrastructure can be tuned to needs so that you never pay too much. There are also no start-up costs.
  • With the public cloud, security is an important aspect. With AWS, data remains secure because standard secure configurations are used. Services do not get access to other services until you explicitly grant access.
  • AWS is configured to implement innovations easily and quickly, without having to invest in expensive hardware. This allows you to excel quickly as a business.

How do you migrate to AWS quickly and responsibly?

AWS offers a proven method for cloud migration, with its Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). As an AWS partner, SoftwareONE can guide your organisation through this process to make your migration effective and cost-efficient.

The key is to build a detailed business case, of which an optimisation and licensing assessment (OLA) is an important part. That way, you establish the total cost of ownership (TCO) when you transfer existing workloads to AWS. For customers with more than a hundred servers, the OLA is paid for with AWS funding. Based on the OLA, it can be determined whether you are entitled to further funding from Amazon.

Once the OLA is finalised, you detail the plan for migration to AWS. This includes building an AWS landing zone for the migration. For this, you need to decide how to migrate applications. Options are no changes (rehosting) and replatforming. The latter option might be better, as you modify the code for the cloud. Other R’s are rethink, refactor, relicense, rebuild, repurchase, retain and retire. Check out SoftwareONE’s 10R infographic.

If the right migration plan is in place, the actual migration should not disrupt business continuity. Usually an incremental migration will be desired, leaving the old environment intact so work can continue as usual. After the migration, major improvements in efficiency can be expected, for instance through reduced maintenance. By continuously adding more automation, your company can continue to reduce costs.

For example, SoftwareONE helped an organisation migrate to AWS. This organisation saved 31 per cent in operational costs. It also gave the IT department more time for innovation and optimising services.

Find out more about the latest developments

Are you ready to start migrating to the cloud? With Softwareone’s eBook: Start your cloud journey, they will help you map out the right route.