The business case for moving to the cloud is no longer about if, it’s about how fast. In a market where agility, scalability, and speed to market make the difference between leading and lagging, the cloud becomes a strategic imperative.
Migrating to AWS and modernising your infrastructure offer your business the agility to experiment and scale without the friction of traditional infrastructure. It accelerates innovation cycles, allowing your teams to release features faster and deliver value to your customers more efficiently. And yes, it can also help optimising costs by reducing capital expenditures and enabling a smarter use of operational budgets.
Why AWS?
As Gartner reports regularly show, AWS is the clear leader in the cloud space and continues to invest heavily in R&D and new services by releasing thousands of new features every year. This pace of innovation provides businesses with a continually expanding toolkit to differentiate their offerings and streamline operations. It also underscores the costs of standing still: businesses failing to modernise accumulate technical debt, rely on outdated systems, and eventually fall behind competitors who are effectively using cloud-native architectures.
Beyond Lift-and-Shift
At one time, cloud migration was largely synonymous with “lift-and-shift”, i.e., re-hosting workloads from on-premises data centres into the cloud with minimal change. That approach had its place, especially for businesses seeking quick wins or trying to exit a costly data centre contract. But migration today is more than just moving servers, it’s about transforming how your business delivers technology. Modernisation means rethinking applications, replatforming services, and embracing cloud-native patterns that enhance resilience and increase business agility.
In a previous blog post, I covered the seven common AWS migration strategies, and it’s worth revisiting that post if you’re considering which migration path suits your workloads. Bear in mind that there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy: you need to assess the best migration strategy for each of your workloads. AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) helps you planning which migration strategy to pick and also offers funding, tooling, and partner support tailored to each phase of the migration, from assessment through mobilisation to migration and modernisation.
Modernise your infrastructure on AWS
Modernising your infrastructure on AWS unlocks a new level of capability. For example, containerisation gives you portability, scalability, as well as efficiency, and you can choose between Amazon ECS if you favour ease of use or Amazon EKS if you’re looking for Kubernetes compatibility. If you want to completely sidestep server management, AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers at all, ideal for workloads with unpredictable traffic or batch processing needs.
On the data side, modernising means moving away from traditional monolithic databases to managed services like Amazon Aurora, which offers high performance and availability at global scale, or Amazon DynamoDB for a serverless and NoSQL database that scales automatically. These managed services free up your teams from managing backups, replication, patching, and scaling so that they can focus on new features and customer value.
If your business is considering modernisation opportunities related to AI and Machine Learning, consider managed services like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker to bring AI into your products faster, with less friction, and with a rich palette of large language models to choose from.
Optimising cost while modernising
Cost optimisation remains a top priority for any business, especially during and after a modernisation effort. AWS gives you a number of leavers to pull in this space. Reserves Instances and Savings Plans help you commit to predictable workloads at reduced rates. Spot Instances are ideal for fault-tolerant or flexible workloads that can benefit from unused capacity at up to 90% off. You can use these cost saving tools to shape your cost profile in a way that aligns with your business goals.
To monitor and manage spending proactively, AWS also provides Cost Explorer, which gives you detailed insights into usage patterns, and AWS Budgets, which lets you set custom alerts and cost guardrails. Together, they offer a data-driven way to ensure that your cloud adoption doesn’t outpace your cost controls.
Success Stories
Enterprises in media, fintech, GenAI, and beyond have reported major cost savings, shorter release cycles, and better customer experiences after migrating and modernising on AWS. One example in the media industry is Canal+ Group, which saved 30% in IT costs by modernising on AWS. In the fintech space, NatWest Group reduced the time to launch new products and services by several months. The consistent thread across these stories isn’t just that they moved to AWS: they embraced modernisation as a continuous journey, not a one-time event.
Whether you’re starting your migration journey or already on the path to modernisation, AWS offers the tools, services, and partner support to turn your infrastructure into a business advantage. How long can you afford to wait?
Keeping on top of all the latest features can feel like an impossible task. Is practical infrastructure modernisation an area you are interested in hearing more about? Book a free chat with us to discuss this further.
This blog is written exclusively by The Scale Factory team. We do not accept external contributions.
