While the cloud’s value extends far beyond the total cost of ownership (TCO) to encompass factors like flexibility, scalability, staff productivity and operational resilience, it is important that organisations adhere to an appropriate governance policy to validate and monitor their cloud spend.
The AWS Cloud Economics program can be an invaluable guide in delivering an effective migration strategy and business case.
While the AWS Cloud Economics program is useful for all sorts of different businesses and different business sizes, it’s primarily aimed at those organisations looking to implement large-scale cloud migrations, such as enterprise or government. It’s a program that provides a comprehensive set of tools to facilitate that journey, while exploring the cost considerations of the migration, because there are multiple pathways to migrate, and each will require different financial input. Fundamental to the exercise is deciding the most suitable migration approach for each key workload as well as rightsizing, working out which is the most suitable pathway for any individual organisation to take.
To optimise the journey to migration, particularly large-scale migrations, the AWS Cloud Economics program comprises the following steps:
READINESS
This is where the assessment of the situation takes place, when the AWS partner team and the customer determine how ready the business is to begin its migration journey by examining the current workload and the overall operations. More than a simple check from a budgeting perspective, this is where the levels of support for the migration and the current agility of both the organisation as a whole and the ICT services will be assessed. Potentially, all the business’s relevant stakeholders will be involved in a series of workshops to gather the necessary information.
TOOLING AIDED ASSESSMENT
Larger migrations may benefit more from using this approach, with multiple tools being utilised. AWS has a number of appropriate products, including its Migration Portfolio Assessment (MPA) tool, and there are also partnering companies that provide specialised software probes and tools to intelligently collect useful data regarding workflows and other processes from the customer’s environment.
GENERATE THE BUSINESS CASE
Collating and analysing the data gleaned from the previous stages – as well as the workshops, additional manual collection and business priority input – enables the creation of the business case, which will highlight the projected savings the migration is projected to realise.
RUN THE PILOT
A pilot of the migration may take up to four months, or longer, depending on the nature of the applications and the workloads. The more forensic the planning and pilot stages, with any identified wrinkles ironed out and every detail verified, the smoother the actual migration is likely to be. Confident that all the risks have already been managed and mitigated, it’s a simpler task to leverage the scalable automatic migration tools to perform a large-scale migration more quickly and efficiently.
CONTINUAL IMPROVEMENT
The actual migration is not the end of the journey for the Cloud Economics program. In fact, even while the migration is rolling out, the question of whether it can be reduced should be asked. If it’s possible to shorten the migration’s duration, this will directly influence the outcome of the business case. While the migration is running, there is also the parallel run of the current on-premises data centres, compute, and storage still operating and incurring costs. This is a great opportunity to efficiently reduce the parallel run, to enable a more economic model.
And once the migration is complete, there is always more opportunity to review and possibly perform further optimisation; for example, using a more efficient compute type to replace the current one, or using a cloud native database service.