Companies move to the cloud for many different reasons. Maybe they need to shut down an aging data center. Or, they're looking for new features that are too expensive or too difficult to build and maintain in-house. Whatever the reason, before they start planning the migration, they have another question to answer: Which cloud service is right for their needs?
At Halo Cloud, we work closely with Amazon Web Services (Amazon Cloud Technology) - a deep understanding of the unique advantages, financial support and other programs that can provide you.
Amazon Web Services has a proven approach to help organizations migrate to the cloud – the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). This divides the journey into three stages:
- Evaluate
- mobilize, and
- Migrate and modernize.
As an Amazon Cloud Technology Partner, we know how to guide you through each of these stages and make your migration as effective and cost-effective as possible.
The goal of the assessment phase is to build a detailed business case for the migration. We work with you to identify business drivers, recruitment and training costs, decommissioning costs, tooling costs and sunk costs to get an accurate picture of your total cost of ownership (TCO) for up to 5 years. Key to this phase is Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) .
What you learned from Optimization and License Assessment (OLA)
The goal of the OLA is to build an initial business case for the migration, including a high-level picture of the TCO when migrating existing workloads to AWS. We begin with a 30-day, light-touch auto-discovery process to understand your current on-premises environment and Microsoft licensing status.
Using this information, we will provide you with a high-level assessment of your TCO on Amazon Web Technologies, as well as recommendations on how to use your existing licenses. TCO information will help you find out if you qualify for one of two MAP funding programs: MAP Lite or MAP Large.
For customers with 100+ servers, OLA is paid through Amazon Cloud Technology Funds and can be done at no cost to your organization.
Decide which R is right for you
Next comes the Mobilise phase, which results in a complete plan for migrating to Amazon Web Technologies, including how to build the basic landing zone for the migration. This involves establishing a priority for each local application based on which of the 10 so-called R's is most applicable.
Is the application amenable to simple rehosting – a kind of lift and shift where you make only minor changes directly to the cloud? Or is replatforming a better option, either re-platforming with automatic migration (automatic) or re-platforming the application with some code changes to tune the cloud infrastructure? Other Rs that may apply include refactoring (migration with breaking changes), relicensing, retention or retirement.
Choosing the right R is critical to a successful migration. For example, lift and shift doesn't necessarily bring all the value of the cloud – it could end up being more expensive, depending on what your initial infrastructure looks like. While rehosting and retargeting are relatively easy and quick to accomplish, replatforming and refactoring require more effort. Halo Cloud can assess your application environment and carefully consider all 7 R's, including re-licensing, to bring the application to the best target model for your needs.
Figure: 7 Migration Strategies
How One Organization Migrated to Amazon Cloud Technology
A publisher and research organization we worked with had long relied on on-premises data centers, but over time this infrastructure ended up accumulating a large amount of technical debt: outdated operating systems, code, and hardware, and some near-life support contracts. This makes it increasingly difficult to meet user expectations for digital services and innovations.
Working with our team, the organization decided to migrate to Amazon Web Technologies and created a Cloud Center of Excellence to optimize the migration. Simultaneously, our team built a landing zone for migrating to Amazon Cloud Technologies and developed solutions to accelerate the organization's continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
Our team then created an in-depth business case for the migration using the AWS MAP plan, along with a plan to manage business changes throughout the migration process. Together, the organization adopted a "migration factory" philosophy to ensure that multiple projects were successfully delivered within tight timelines without disruption to business. Migration occurs in two phases, first moving enterprise workloads, followed by publishing workloads.
After the migration, the organization's IT maintenance needs are significantly lower than before. This not only helps reduce operational costs (moving to Amazon Cloud Technologies saves an average of 31% on infrastructure costs), but also frees up an organization's IT team to focus on innovating and optimizing services. Our teams continue to support the business by monitoring and managing workloads to ensure compliance, security and continuous improvement.
Continuous Optimization Journey
This is a key advantage of migrating to Amazon Cloud Technologies using MAP under the guidance of Halo Cloud: the opportunity for continuous improvement.
Halo Cloud has its roots in licensing optimization: we have the experience to make sure you don't pay more than you need to, while keeping your applications up-to-date and effective. In addition, we have extensive expertise in many other areas: automation and serverless workloads, managed services, application modernization, FinOps for optimizing cloud expenses and consumption, and more. We are also unique in our ability to execute all 7Rs - something few other organizations can do.