Cloud Migration and Modernisation with AWS

Migrating to the cloud has become inevitable for businesses today to remain competitive and cost-effective. For CIOs, it is no longer a question of why migrate to the cloud. Rather, it has become a question of when (your organisation’s cloud roadmap), how (what is your cloud deployment model and which (the cloud platform and set of cloud services you use).  

Cloud migration has especially become a no-brainer when it comes to migrating, modernising, and building AI/ML, automation and analytics solutions. CIOs today realise that speed and efficiency are critical factors for effective cloud migration efforts. Additionally, it is important to note that just “lifting and shifting” applications from on-premise legacy systems to the cloud will not make business sense always, especially if the app is not cloud-ready.  

Therefore, it is important to first assess the cloud-readiness of your applications, lift and shift those that can be migrated as is; modernise the rest by refactoring; and retiring those that are not cloud-ready.  

At the outset, this can seem intimidating, time-consuming, and complex. But, with the right cloud technology solutions partner, it’ll be a seamless transition. Often, companies end up with the wrong technology partner or decide to do it in-house and struggle to find the right talent.  

Autodesk – Mass Migration of 400 Applications to the AWS Cloud 

Autodesk, the leading 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software company, wanted to bring greater efficiency into its technology operations.  

The company transformed its data center/cloud hybrid model to a cloud-first model using AWS through mass migration and modernisation. Over a period of four months, Autodesk modernised over 400 applications and made 115 of them AWS-certified. The company’s CIO was extremely happy with the cost savings from the move, ease of operations, and overall better security across the Autodesk ecosystem.  

The workforce was reskilled and was able to deliver more innovative services and automation capabilities. Thanks to the cloud migration effort, the team could focus on building self-service experiences for end-users, while at the same time reducing infrastructure costs.  

The company adopted a three-pronged approach across the cloud migration lifecycle:  

• Technology: Migrating workloads quickly from physical data centers to the cloud to enhance the performance and reliability of AWS applications using the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).  
• People: A L&D initiative was started to transform its people into cloud experts and create a Center of Excellence (CoE) for upskilling employees and continuous learning.  
• Process: Separate migration teams were formed to cater to the individual needs of its global delivery teams with specific goals and targets. Each team independently worked with the application owners to execute the application migrations by forming a schedule, executing them, and coordinating go-lives. 

AWS for Cost- and Time-Effective Migration and Modernisation  

While moving the cloud has become a necessity from an operations and technology standpoint, there is another factor that is helping CIOs get buy-in from executive management. The TCO (Total Cost of Operations) of maintaining, managing, and monitoring cloud-based applications is a lot lesser. While the exact TCO depends on no. of applications, infrastructure requirements, etc., technology decision-makers are convinced that maintaining and upgrading apps on the cloud is more cost-effective. This is primarily because cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP offer a suite of tools and services to make operations easier.  

Of course, the biggest shift from a financial perspective is to move to an OpEx model, instead of investing in infrastructure upfront. The AWS platform also enables ease of digital transformation, is agile, and is designed to optimise both compute and storage workloads.  

When migrating to AWS, it is recommended to follow a three-phase process, each being iterative – driving repeatability and predictability across the migration lifecycle.  

AWS offers a comprehensive set of migration tools and is supported by a mature third-party migration tooling ecosystem that enables automation and AI/ML-based intelligent recommendations to ensure simplified and effective migration. 

The three phases include –  

1. Assessment 

This is an important step to understand the current readiness of the organisation to operate in the cloud, identify business goals, and articulate the business case for the migration.  

A Merit expert adds, “AWS provides tools such as Migration Evaluator for assessing the on-premises resources and estimating the projected total cost of ownership (TCO) based on usage of resources. AWS Migration Hub enables generating right-sized EC2 instance recommendations to run on-premise workloads in AWS.” 

2. Accelerated Migration 

When migrating and modernising applications, AWS increases operational efficiency, improves scalability, and enhances performance. AWS’s Migration Acceleration Program connects customers with experienced service providers to retire data centers and facilitates the move to the cloud with minimal disruption of daily operations.  

3. Optimise Existing Investments 

AWS facilitates the integration of legacy applications with cloud-native solutions to improve ROI from capital investments. While it is essential to migrate to the cloud for modern, next-generation AI/ML and analytics applications, there are several legacy applications that work well and there is no reason to migrate. A classic example is an on-premise ERP solution built on Oracle (or SAP) that is difficult to migrate to the AWS cloud. You could choose to migrate to the Oracle cloud (if you like) and deploy data pipelines so these legacy ERP applications (cloud or on-premise) can seamlessly integrate with cloud warehouses.  

Key Benefits of Migrating to AWS 

Some of the key benefits of moving to AWS include :

• Lower cost of cloud operations  
• Greater agility and improved productivity of the IT team 
• More security and resilience 
• Streamlined modernisation of end-of-life products 

• Consolidation of data centre operations 
• Accelerated digital transformation 
• Scaling up and down based on need 
• Integrating IoT and machine learning workloads with ease  

Merit’s Expertise in Cloud Migration and Modernisation to AWS 

Merit works with a broad range of clients and industry sectors, designing and building bespoke applications and data platforms combining software engineering, AI/ML, and data analytics.  

We migrate legacy systems with re-architecture and by refactoring them to contemporary technologies on modern cloud ecosystems. Our software engineers build resilient and scalable solutions with cloud services ranging from simple internal software systems to large-scale enterprise applications.  

Our agile approach drives every stage of the customer journey; from planning to design development and implementation, delivering impactful and cost-effective digital transformations.  

To know more, visit: https://www.meritdata-tech.com/service/code/digital-engineering-solutions/