Planning, partnership keys for success
Modernising enterprise workloads by moving to the cloud is a huge step for most organisations. These modernisation efforts involve a significant investment of money, time, and effort. Companies also need to have the right skill sets available, or partner with a provider who can provide the necessary expertise.
Modernising operations by progressively transforming Microsoft-based applications and infrastructure into AWS native and purpose-built services can help companies unlock new business capabilities, accelerate innovation, save on Windows licensing spend, and reduce technical debt. Since most enterprises are running their business on Microsoft Windows, this represents a major opportunity to move those operations to the cloud.
The numbers tell the story: According to a recent IDC report, customers that move their Windows workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) will see a 56% reduction in the cost of operations over five years, and a 442% increase in ROI over the same period.
Most modernisation efforts begin with migrating to the cloud. With the AWS cloud specifically, powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, companies can realize not only increased levels of agility and savings, but also higher performance and improved reliability.
Migrating and modernising these enterprise-critical workloads is a major shift. The stakes are high as these workloads support core business processes, playing a critical role in the day-to-day operations, and often store massive volumes of corporate data.
Have a plan, follow the plan
When migrating enterprise workloads to the cloud, having a strategy and plan of action is critical. That plan must include a comprehensive assessment, financial analysis, migration preparedness, and having a clear view of all licensing details.
- First, assess the current enterprise compute situation, including system performance and resource allocation and consumption (for compute, network, and storage functions).
- Next, prepare a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study that builds the business case, including how migration will support data transformation and digital innovation. This TCO study should include an Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA) to understand potential savings on licensing costs.
- Run a Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA), a workshop AWS provides that covers all relevant aspects of the migration for individual workloads. The AWS Migration Evaluator (ME) can also help build the business case for migration.
True enterprise modernisation and innovation starts with this level of enterprise workload migration. Once into full cloud operations, companies can operate with a greater degree of agility to refactor enterprise applications, explore efficiencies enabled by advanced technologies like containers and serverless, delve into open-source technologies, and expand agile development practices.
Cost savings remains a primary reason for modernising operations by migrating to the cloud. By modernising these operations on the AWS cloud, companies can get out of endless upgrade cycles and achieve the levels of capacity, performance, scale and security for which they have been striving. And with offerings like Amazon EC2 Spot instances featuring Intel Xeon Scalable processors, companies can quickly see significant operational savings.
Data transformation and enhanced business intelligence are additional significant drivers for enterprise modernisation. Migrating business data to the cloud and modernising those operations unlocks the potential for achieving new business insights and the ability to bring a broad set of analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and scalable database tools and functions to bear.
Consider the type of partner that can best help with your enterprise migration and modernisation. Your organisation might need assistance determining how to best prepare and how to start. There may be specific migration/modernisation tools available to suit your organisation’s unique requirements. The time is now to move on from on-premises legacy technologies and restrictive licensing. AWS can help modernise your Windows-based enterprise workloads using cloud-native technologies. With AWS, you can eliminate expensive Windows licensing and reap the cloud benefits of improved price/performance, agility and scalability.