AWS FOR MIGR ATION

Business transformation
through digital modernization
Migrating critical applications, infrastructure, operations,
and management to the AWS Cloud
Becoming a modern business
Today’s businesses must adapt to rapidly changing market conditions, manage and
derive insights from massive volumes of data, and meet the rising demands of today’s
always-on customers. In short, they must modernize—rethinking processes and
leveraging technology to seize opportunities earlier, achieve maximum value from their
investments, and innovate faster than ever before.

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic further drive these changes. Businesses
across all industries must now move even faster to embrace new work styles and drive
down costs. Recent research suggests that more than 90 percent of enterprises are
accelerating cloud adoption plans because of COVID-19.1

Many organizations are instituting digital transformation initiatives in response to these

growing pressures. By embracing new ways of building applications and services, these
organizations can connect previously siloed data, streamline processes, and accelerate
innovation in ways that delight their customers.

Digital transformation promises substantial rewards, with leading companies achieving

critical business advantages such as higher productivity, faster time to market, and a
stronger bottom line.

Reaching these rewards can prove challenging, however. Digital transformation

represents a massive undertaking involving far-reaching changes to technology,
processes, and culture. Breaking the process down into distinct phases can help prevent
organizations from losing their way.

1
Flexera, 2021 2
Understanding the 1 IT modernization involves transforming legacy systems,
processes, workloads, and infrastructure as you migrate to the

two stages of digital cloud. This stage will be the primary focus of this eBook.

modernization
2
Application modernization leverages cloud-native systems
and services to drive a new iterative, intelligent, and agile way of
No two modernization projects are the same. In helping thousands of harnessing data and developing applications.
organizations successfully reach their business outcomes, AWS identified
Read on to discover how IT modernization works, why it’s
two distinct modernization stages.
important, and how your organization can realize the associated
Many of our customers have found it beneficial to break the larger benefits on your path toward digital transformation.
digital transformation effort into these two stages: IT modernization and
application modernization.

Digital modernization

Assessment Transform with

modern DevOps

AWS
Infrastructure
IT App
Readiness & Build new apps
modernization modernization with serverless
planning

Operations &
optimizations

Migration Move to managed 3

container services
Accelerate IT
modernization
with cloud migration
The cloud provides the ideal environment for IT modernization.
Because cloud vendors build elastic compute, networking, and storage
infrastructures with a global footprint, your IT team can spend less time
on customer needs and more time pursuing differentiating work.

The cloud makes it possible to convert IT investments from fixed to

variable, helping you improve cost-efficiency through pay-per-use
models. The right cloud partner can provide you with high availability,
fast and efficient storage, and strong security—protecting your
reputation and your assets. And the cloud can give you peace of mind
for the future. You can scale up or down as your needs change, and
your provider will take care of any updates and patches, removing the
operational burden from your team.

But before you can take advantage of the cloud, you’ll need to migrate
your workloads and applications.

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Is it time to migrate?
Here are four questions you should ask as you decide whether to migrate to the cloud:

1 Is keeping your apps and data on-premises preventing your

business from delivering a better customer experience,
developing new products and services faster, and ultimately
2 Are you spending time finding and training skilled professionals
to manage, maintain, and provision hardware and software,
manage licenses, create and maintain security postures, and
increasing your competitive position and company value? ensure compliance for things that could be relocated or replaced
in the cloud with fully managed offerings?

3 Is your current infrastructure delivering the performance and

scale needed to keep teams working efficiently? Is your critical 4 Does your team have the necessary skills and experience to
complete a migration without assistance? Should you engage
business data accessible and delivering the insights your business with a third-party vendor to provide backup and training and
needs to compete? Are your legacy systems integrated with help drive your migration? Will working with an experienced
modern systems to deliver optimal customer experiences? provider accelerate the achievement of your migration and
modernization goals?

Once you’ve made some decisions about when and what to migrate, you can start crafting the strategy that will guide you through the actual
process of migration. But first, it’s important to have a general understanding of that process, how it works, and how it integrates with your
broader modernization efforts.

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Forging the migration/modernization connection
Understanding the migration process is key to taking full advantage of the Up to now, we’ve been speaking about migration as the first phase or starting
cloud. One way to think about the move to the cloud is to look to the natural point of IT modernization. And that’s true in the sense that the cloud is the ideal
world and other species’ migration patterns. Whales, for example, migrate environment for modernization, and migration is how you get there. But it’s not
to new environments to gain access to better food and conditions that allow always a linear, migrate-then-modernize process.
the pod to prosper and grow. Knowing they must move is only one piece of
the puzzle; whales must also partake in the process, caring for each other and Migration and modernization are more like two sides of the same coin.
ensuring all members of the pod have what they need as they adjust to any The order in which they happen will be unique to your needs and to the
unforeseen circumstances along the way. characteristics of the workload or app. Migration and modernization will also
overlap and intersect, and the right strategy will have you migrating while you
Transforming your business in the cloud is a similar process. First, you choose a modernize and modernizing while you migrate.
provider and migrate your applications, infrastructure, and data. But, just as the
whales must adapt to changes as they migrate, it’s what you do throughout and
after a migration that will enable you to arrive at the ideal destination.

Characteristics of a modern enterprise

Customer- Strategic use

obsessed of data
Modern digital
business

Organized Test-and-learn Technology

for value culture at the core

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Planning your
modernization strategy
The right strategy can help you migrate and modernize faster, smarter, and
with minimal downtime. Use the following three steps to guide you as you
consider and create your migration plan:

1
Make sure you build a foundation in Cloud Operations that
will help your team transition to managing, monitoring, and
continually optimizing your new cloud resources.

2 Consider the tools and services you’ll need to efficiently

migrate your servers, applications, and data to the cloud.

3
Prioritize which workloads will derive the most benefit from
cloud infrastructure and cloud-native services.

Once you’ve devised a solid plan, you’ll be poised to choose your migration
and modernization partner.

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Migrating and modernizing with AWS
When migrating applications and data to the cloud, organizations often start Our approach to migrating and modernizing enterprise workloads is
with mission-critical workloads that consume the most resources on-premises driving real and measurable outcomes for our customers across cost
and in data centers. Over 1 million active customers have chosen AWS to help savings, staff productivity, operational resilience, and business agility.
them do just that—quickly, strategically, and cost-effectively.
We’ve been migrating Windows and SAP workloads for more than 10 years,
At AWS, we have more than a decade of direct customer experience with and we’re the first and only VMware public cloud partner to jointly engineer
thousands of the world’s largest enterprises migrating Windows, SAP, a fully managed solution. We’ve migrated over 350,000 databases. And we’ve
VMware, and Oracle workloads. This experience has helped us design and honed mainframe migration strategies and a partner ecosystem that is being
hone our tools, guidance, services, and programs to simplify workload leveraged by some of the world’s largest enterprises. Find out why so many
renovation for our customers. organizations choose AWS to help them digitally transform and meet their
migration and modernization objectives.
AWS customers can choose from industry-leading free resources, AWS
Professional Services, and more than 170 certified AWS Migration
Competency Partners to guide your migration and modernization journey.

2x
Higher performance for an
5,000+
Active customers running
43%
Reduction in IT
350k+
Databases migrated
70%+Reduction in IT
SQL Server workload than the SAP on AWS infrastructure costs with to AWS infrastructure costs
next largest cloud provider2 VMware Cloud on AWS with AWS

2
When directly testing an r5b.8xlarge instance, according to a 2021 Principled Technologies report 8
Considering AWS Why move to AWS Cloud Operations?

Cloud Operations
As with any change, you likely want to understand more about the “why” before you
take your first steps. Here are some of the reasons AWS Cloud Operations can help
your organization thrive in an ever-changing digital world:

AWS has the experience and services to not only

assist you with your transition to the cloud—but also End-to-end management of application portfolios
to manage your solution. AWS Cloud Operations Manage and govern your applications on premises and in the cloud throughout
comprise a set of fully managed AWS services, AWS all the stages of delivery. The result? Improved consistency and safety for your
Partner services, and AWS Professional Services, as deployments, as well as shortened time to resolution for app issues.
well as prescriptive guidance and best practices. AWS
Cloud Operations can help you build, manage, and
Support of modern and traditional development processes
Accelerate application development velocity—no matter what your organization
govern your application portfolio, overcoming any
looks like. We’ll support you in successfully leveraging the tenets of modern app
resource management and compliance challenges to
design, including microservices, containers, and serverless architectures. We have
reap the rewards of digital transformation.
the tools to help you adopt DevOps and build an operations platform to centrally
enable your developers. And as you journey toward a fully modernized development
process, we can also help you achieve more with your traditional app development.

Cloud and hybrid support

Monitor, manage, and operate app portfolios in the cloud and on-premises. Enjoy
a unified view of AWS resources, apps, and services in one control panel. Manage
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) containerized and serverless apps
across Windows, Linux, and Mac—securely and at scale.

Improve governance and compliance

Empower your IT operators, cloud architects, and software developers to incorporate
your organization’s compliance rules and policies into dev processes. You’ll reap the
rewards of consistency and safety in your deployments, accelerate innovation for
your products and services, and elevate your security with infrastructure built for the
highest standards of privacy and data protection.

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Delivering business The AWS Cloud Operations Model:

agility and control • Manages highly dynamic cloud resources at a massive scale
• Offers the most complete set of cloud-native capabilities for
Cloud Operations
Building a modern business means protecting the privacy of your
• Is trusted by more than 1 million customers (more than any
customers, securing your data and digital assets, and maintaining
other cloud provider)
regulatory compliance. Unfortunately, these concerns can sometimes run
counter to your other business objectives. Without the proper strategies, • Comprises a broad partner ecosystem
processes, and technology in place, security and privacy controls can slow • Offers a single control plane for management and governance
down performance, reduce agility, and increase costs.
• Assesses cost savings and analyzes resource utilization
We understand that you need the right tools to enable your development
When you monitor the health of your infrastructure with AWS,
teams while ensuring you have the controls and guardrails to do your job
you’ll get a single comprehensive view of your environments, as
successfully. That’s why we offer the AWS Cloud Operations Model—to
well as cost transparency, control, and financial management.
eliminate the need for you to choose between faster innovation and firm
control over cost, compliance, and security.

“...we’ve gone from zero to 100% real-time

visibility, a night-and-day contrast with our
prior security posture.”
Rafael Garrido, Former Director of Information Security, GE Appliances

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Realizing the benefits of IT modernization with AWS
When you modernize your IT, you gain better business agility and control over your applications, data, and infrastructure. You’ll reduce costs in a number of ways.
And you’ll gain easier access to critical data—allowing you to uncover business insights faster and take advantage of more opportunities for growth.

Discover multiple Differentiating Driving modernization

avenues for cost savings yourself with data through migration

IT modernization drives down infrastructure costs, Digital transformation truly begins when you Moving data to AWS opens opportunities to
with the average organization saving 31 percent go beyond what you do with your apps and rethink how you build and deliver software.
by migrating and modernizing with AWS.³ differentiate yourself with data insights. The Your move to AWS should include planning
employee, customer, and transactional data for transitioning people skills to AWS Cloud
Further savings can be realized by reducing or you’ve gathered over years or decades can help Operations and DevOps. Re-platforming and
eliminating costs associated with licensing, you stand out, serving as the foundation for refactoring applications is your opportunity to
software patches, maintenance, and capacity innovation and competitive differentiation at drive change and efficiencies in your business.
and infrastructure upgrades. Modernization frees your organization.
your IT staff from operational burdens, allowing As you get comfortable with cloud operating
them to focus on higher-value tasks—like AWS has the experience, programs, partners, models, you can begin to re-platform and
discovering new efficiencies and ways to reduce and services not only to migrate applications refactor applications to experiment with
spend. And, as discussed in the previous section, and databases to the cloud but also to help efficiencies, leverage more open-source
IT modernization lowers costs through improved you leverage your business data to drive new technologies, and shift operating models away
security and compliance. and differentiated experiences for employees from waterfall to DevOps. These tasks and
and customers. To achieve this, we provide the others comprise the second stage of digital
Be sure to consider all of the avenues of broadest set of analytics, artificial intelligence transformation: application modernization.
cost reduction as you develop your IT (AI), machine learning (ML), and scalable
modernization plan. database options.

Carvalho, L., Marden, M., "Fostering Business and Organizational Transformation to Generate Business Value with Amazon Web Services,”
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IDC, February 2018

With AWS, innovation is built in!
We are innovating faster than any other cloud provider today.
Each of our more than 200 cloud-native services is available
when you’re ready to modernize your development, operations,
and applications—and, ultimately, your business.

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Future-proofing your Get started today
business for success in a Contact an AWS representative ›
changing world Learn more about our programs ›

Now that you know more about IT modernization and the results it can deliver, Read customer success stories ›
let’s take a look at the specific benefits of working with AWS. Across thousands of
successful migrations, we’ve helped our customers achieve the following⁴:
Learn more about the benefits of
working with an AWS Migration
• 31 percent average infrastructure cost savings Competency Partner ›
• 43 percent fewer security incidents per year

• 62 percent IT staff productivity boost

• Three times more features delivered per year

Customers from a variety of industries are using AWS to migrate and modernize.
For more than 10 years, we’ve driven successful migrations for organizations across
nearly every industry and of all shapes and sizes. Trust AWS to help you transform
your business into a customer-centric, digitally savvy enterprise that thrives in
today’s market—and stands ready to conquer tomorrow’s.

“There is no compression algorithm for experience.”

Andy Jassy, CEO, Amazon

Elman, D., "Guidebook: Understanding the Value of Migrating from On-premises to

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AWS for Application Security and Performance,” Nucleus Research, June 2020