Selecting the right cloud provider is crucial for long-term business success. While Azure and AWS are the two major players in the cloud industry, there are compelling reasons for sticking with a single cloud provider.
In this blog post, I’m not going to compare Azure and AWS on their respective technical offering. Instead, I’m going to explore why you may want to consider migrating from Azure to AWS, why this transition might be advantageous for your business, and how to evaluate a migration to AWS.
Three Reasons to Migrate to AWS
Are you trying to convince your C-suite to migrate to AWS? How can you persuade them? Here I want to give three compelling reasons to migrate from Azure to AWS that you can bring to the table when you’re talking to decision makers in your business.
1. Innovation
AWS has consistently led the cloud computing market with groundbreaking innovations. Since its beginnings in the early 2000s, AWS was synonymous with cloud computing and was the major public cloud provider many years before Microsoft launched Azure. In terms of services, AWS gave us Lambda for building serverless architectures and spot instances offering significant cost savings for unused computing capacity. These are just two examples of services that were launched before Azure caught up and offered similar offerings. If you are interested in using cutting-edge technologies as soon as they are available, migrating to AWS can ensure your business stays ahead of the competition.
2. InfoSec
AWS has had bugs but has also had good enough audit logs to be confident that nobody exploited that bug. Azure’s reputation in this respect is not as good. Part of this is due to isolation: if you need to show robust isolation between workloads or tenants, the AWS model makes it easy to show that the isolation is effective. This can greatly help with regulatory compliance.
Furthermore, AWS’s approach to access management is particularly robust and workload-friendly: nearly everything you might want to do with authentication or access controls for workload principals, you can do with an IAM principal. This is a good fit especially for SaaS businesses.
3. AWS Funding Programs
AWS offers funding programs specifically designed to ease the migration process for businesses moving workloads from Azure. These programs can significantly reduce the financial burden of a migration and allow to free resources that can be used for innovation and growth. As an AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Partner, The Scale Factory can help you access AWS funding programs to support your migration initiatives. AWS can cover the costs of our involvement, even if you choose to lead the migration process yourself.
Evaluate the Migration
Before you embark on a migration, you should do a thorough evaluation of financial and operational implications. Here are some of the key areas you need to consider:
- Cost Comparison: AWS and Azure have distinct pricing models. While both offer pay-as-you-go and reserved instance options, AWS often provides more flexible pricing structures and discounts for high-volume users. For example, AWS’s Saving Plans and Consolidated Billing can lead to substantial cost reductions compared to Azure’s equivalent offerings. We recommend you do a cost analysis to reveal opportunities for long-term savings.
- Return on Investment (ROI): Migrating to a cloud provider means leveraging its services. During a migration you have the chance to invest in your existing platform and re-architect it to take advantages of AWS managed services. You have an opportunity to enhance operational efficiency and ultimately capitalize your ROI.
- Migration Costs: Any good CFO worth their salt will ask you an initial estimation of migration costs so be prepared on that front. However, these are short-term expenses and are often offset by AWS’s funding programs. Collaborating with an AWS Migration Partner like us can help you accurately forecast and optimize these costs.
Conclusion
Migrating from Azure to AWS is a strategic move that you should consider. While I’ve not taken into account any technical comparison between the two cloud providers based on their services (which would have required several blog posts), I hope I’ve provided you with a compelling case for making the switch based on the AWS’s leadership on cloud computing, their information security approach, and programs to fund your migration from Azure to AWS.
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.
