The cloud offers tremendous opportunities for companies to innovate faster, reduce costs, and scale elastically. As a CTO or technology decision maker, you may be considering migrating some or all of your workloads to the cloud. The public cloud leader, Amazon Web Services (AWS), provides a highly reliable and secure infrastructure platform with almost unlimited capacity. Migrating to AWS can provide your business with increased agility, scalability, and cost savings. However, not all workloads are suited for the cloud, so a careful evaluation is required.
In this blog post, I will explore the compelling reasons for migrating to the cloud, how to leverage an AWS partner and obtain AWS funding for your migration.
Benefits of Migrating to the Cloud
The cloud is calling, and you should answer. Migrating your systems and infrastructure to the AWS cloud can provide tremendous benefits for your business or organization. In the next sections I’m going to offer you several reasons to move your existing workloads to the cloud and help you build a migration business case for your organization.
Improved Agility and Scalability
One of the main benefits of migrating to AWS is increased agility. With on-demand access to compute, storage, and other services, you can rapidly deploy new resources and applications in minutes rather than weeks or months. This enables you to respond faster to changing business needs. AWS also provides autoscaling, making it easy to match your infrastructure capacity to fluctuating application traffic (think here of Black Friday kind of traffic). AWS allows you to elastically scale up or down based on demand, eliminating the need for costly overprovisioning. You can leverage as much capacity as you need when you need it. AWS offers virtually unlimited on-demand capacity, enabling you to scale seamlessly as your resource needs grow.
Cost Awareness
While the pay-as-you-go pricing model of cloud computing may seem more expensive at first glance compared to owning your own data centres, overall AWS can provide significant cost savings. By only paying for the resources you use, you avoid capital expenditures (CapEx) required for expensive on-premises infrastructure and move to an operating expense (OpEx) model whereby your company is charged on a pay-as-you go pricing model. This cost-effective approach allows organizations to allocate resources efficiently and focus on innovation rather than managing hardware and maintenance.
Increased efficiency, automation, and workload consolidation on AWS can also optimize resource utilization and lower costs. However, bear in mind that migrating to the cloud will not automatically lead to cost reduction without implementing other activities like rearchitecting your workloads to run on the cloud and pro-actively monitoring their cost.
Enhanced Security
AWS places a strong emphasis on security, providing a comprehensive set of tools and features to safeguard data and applications. The AWS Shared Responsibility Model ensures a secure foundation, with AWS managing the security of the cloud infrastructure while customers are responsible for securing their data within the cloud. This collaborative approach provides a robust security framework for businesses of all sizes.
Global Reach and Availability
AWS has a vast global network of data centres, enabling businesses to deploy applications and services close to their end-users for reduced latency and improved performance. This global reach ensures high availability and reliability, crucial for maintaining a positive user experience in today’s digital ecosystem.
When Not to Migrate
Despite the many benefits, there are some scenarios where keeping workloads on-premises may be preferable to migrating them to the cloud. Here are some examples we encountered when talking to clients:
- Applications with stringent latency, bandwidth or data sovereignty requirements
- Legacy applications deeply customized or integrated with on-premises systems
- Workloads requiring access to specialized on-premises hardware
- Non-core applications whose cost and effort required to migrate them outweigh the benefits of migration
For each of these scenarios, you still have options to adopt cloud techniques and services if that’s right for your business. AWS offer on-premises and edge computing options that you manage and govern through their APIs. There are Internet of Things (IoT) integrations available from AWS and the wider cloud ecosystems, and you have the option to deploy network links between any legacy systems and your cloud workloads.
Leveraging an AWS Partner for Migration
While some organizations may have the expertise to manage a cloud migration internally, others might benefit from partnering with AWS experts. The decision depends on factors such as the complexity of the migration, available in-house skills, and the need for specialized knowledge. AWS partners have extensive experience helping enterprises migrate successfully to the cloud. They can assist you determining which workloads to migrate vs keep on-premises, can support with migration planning, design, implementation and optimization while at the same time upskilling your internal teams on AWS. Good AWS partners stay up-to-date on the latest AWS capabilities and best practices and relying on their expertise can enable faster, lower-risk migrations.
If you’re not yet sure on when you should work with an AWS partner, check out why work with an AWS partner from our CEO Jon Topper.
Funding your Migration
For organizations looking to accelerate their migration, AWS offers the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). This program provides funding, incentives, and technical resources to support successful migrations. By participating in MAP, businesses can expedite their cloud migration journey while minimizing risks and ensuring a smooth transition.
MAP funding is available and varies according to the type of program (MAP 2.0 for large migration projects and MAP Lite for small projects), migration type, etc. At the time of writing the MAP funding can go up to $10 million, is delivered in cash payments and AWS credits, and can be used to pay for consulting services delivered by selected AWS partners like The Scale Factory. To qualify, migrations must meet minimum thresholds for workload size, complexity, and have a planned completion date.
If you’re planning your migration to AWS, get in touch to know more about the funding available via MAP as it can streamline your path to the cloud and offset migration costs.
Conclusion
Migrating to the AWS cloud opens up a world of possibilities for businesses seeking agility, scalability, cost awareness, and enhanced security. While not all workloads are suited to the cloud, many can realize significant benefits and an AWS partner can provide expertise to smooth the transition and advice on funding available.
The cloud is calling so decide if you want to focus on driving more business value or managing your own data centres.
Our team knows how to manage the risks around moving data to the cloud. We also know how risky it can be if you don’t have a cloud copy of your critical data. Book a free chat to find out how we can help.
This blog is written exclusively by The Scale Factory team. We do not accept external contributions.
