Many business drivers lead customers to pursue a migration to the cloud. Cost reduction and optimization are generally at the top of the list. While cost is critical, oftentimes, additional factors play a role, including improved agility, going global in minutes and the desire to take advantage of AI\/ML capabilities.<\/p>\n
A recent IDC study<\/a>, surveyed 27 companies around the world running various enterprise workloads on AWS to better understand the cloud\u2019s impact on their business. The study found that customers using AWS lowered the cost of their IT services as well as transformed their business to better address market demand. These businesses achieved this by optimizing their IT environments. IDC calculates that organizations will spend 31 percent less on AWS than running workloads on traditional infrastructure.<\/p>\n By shifting their IT staff to focus on strategic business goals, IDC projects that teams will be, on average, 62 percent more efficient, and application developers will be 25 percent more productive on AWS.<\/strong> The study also found that on AWS, customers found seven times fewer downtime hours and three times more features delivered each year.<\/p>\n The benefits of using AWS migration to move to the cloud are numerous \u2013 but it still requires a huge lift on your business. Where do you get started?<\/p>\n While many companies in the cloud space have a different methodology for their cloud migration journey<\/a>, one thing remains constant \u2013 you must start with a plan. Here at Centric, we refer to this phase as \u201cstrategy and planning,\u201d others might say \u201cdiscovery,\u201d and AWS uses \u201cassess.\u201d<\/p>\n The objective of the assess phase is to develop a well-defined business plan and total cost of ownership (TCO). During this phase, you\u2019ll want to:<\/p>\n Let\u2019s look at each of these steps more closely.<\/p>\n To reach your objective, reviewing who in your organization will pioneer your move to the cloud<\/a> is important. You\u2019ll want to build a team that includes stakeholders from multiple business teams who will focus on your organization\u2019s adoption of the cloud. By aligning these key players, you can secure buy-in early, as well as gain a plethora of perspectives. This increases collaboration and encourages cross-functional efforts.<\/strong><\/p>\n This team will become your cloud subject matter experts (SMEs), tasked with building your company\u2019s cloud best practice, educating peers and standardizing tools and methodologies. To help with this process, you\u2019ll want to take advantage of the AWS Well-Architected Framework<\/a> (WAF). You can look at this as a collection of best practices designed with reliable workload provisioning architecture that follows specific patterns and monitors performance efficiency.<\/p>\n Before building out your TCO and business plan, you need to analyze your inventory. This includes evaluating clearly defined costs as well as intangible costs. It\u2019s important to consider what you\u2019re currently spending to run your data center (power, cooling, management, real estate). From here, you can identify candidates to migrate to the cloud and cloud benefit opportunities.<\/strong> To create your business case, take an inventory of your run cost, cost of change, impacts on staff productivity and business value.<\/p>\n To conduct the initial evaluation of your IT resources, AWS provides tools for storing this information and providing initial recommendations. You can use the AWS Migration Hub<\/a> and AWS Migration Evaluator<\/a> for early-stage analysis.<\/p>\n AWS Migration Hub is designed to be a single place to discover your existing servers, group servers into applications, and track the status of each application as it migrates.<\/p>\n Migration Hub has three ways to ingest data. You can import data using a .CSV file, deploy an agentless collector using a discovery connector or attach a discovery agent to each on-premises server to collect specifications on each of your Virtual Machines (VMs) or physical servers.<\/p>\n Migration Hub allows you to view the details of your IT inventory at a granular level. This includes the OS, physical configuration, RAM allocation and so on. Historical information, such as the average CPU utilization and read\/write IOPS, makes Migration Hub particularly useful if you\u2019d like a detailed, time-driven report on your server performance data. Migration Hub also provides instance recommendations that help you calculate how much your infrastructure will cost to run in the cloud.<\/strong><\/p>\nBeginning Your AWS Migration Journey<\/h2>\n
Dive Into the AWS Migration Assess Phase<\/h2>\n
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1. Determine if You Are Ready for an AWS Migration<\/h3>\n
2. Take Inventory of Your IT Environment<\/h3>\n
AWS Migration Hub<\/h4>\n
AWS Migration Evaluator<\/h4>\n