Most enterprises have been looking at Amazon AWS to help augment their computing, networking and storage needs.
Amazon AWS has been leveling the playing field by providing the same resources to all businesses, big, medium or small. However, giving companies access to the same infrastructure is not all it wants to do. Werner Vogels revealed that the provider is also offering features and services that would help companies take advantage of data. Data is what gives a company an edge over its competitors, specifically the quality of data and the questions that this data answers. As such, Amazon services also offer the widest range of analytics compared to other cloud service providers.
Also, AWS’ database offering (which is designed for the cloud) is Amazon’s fastest growing segment.
Say goodbye to over provisioning of licenses
In the past, companies often had to buy licenses upfront. Moreover, they would need to buy more licenses than they need because they are afraid that they would be under provisioned. A chief technology officer would have to think ahead to five years of use, and would rather err on the side of getting licenses for things that they do not need or utilize.
This is something that Vogels is very aware of, having been Amazon’s CTO during it pre-cloud days. He revealed that he often over provisioned on licenses and that includes database services.
And thus, Amazon’s database offering was born. Users of AWS would be charged based on the level of use and how many hours the database was utilized.
This was certainly good news for CTOs and tech managers who had difficulties in planning their usage five years ahead and are looking to save money on licenses. But AWS takes it a step further by providing CTOs with migration tools, such as the AWS Database Migration Service and the AWS Application Directory. These services aim to make every business move to the cloud a whole lot easier and less painful.
AWS makes it easier to move to the cloud
What’s more, AWS also helped develop a MySQL version that would work on multiple servers and then scaled out to different users.
Amazon’s head of enterprise strategy, Stephen Orban, says that most of their users do the migration on their own. Orban reveals that Amazon AWS has a team of professional consultants that can help businesses move their databases to the cloud but there are no plans to make this group bigger and as such, these professional consultants would not be able to stay with you in the long haul.
Orban further reveals that in a large-scale migration that involves 5,000 application workloads, a company would need around 50 technologists, and only five of these would be from AWS, while the remaining would come from the customer’s technology team, and Amazon partners such ClearScale, Datapipe, or Accenture.
Orban also outlines the six migration techniques that every business should know.
- Replatforming, or tinkering with an application before it is moved to the cloud. In this case, you give your applications some optimizations that make it work better on a cloud environment. But these optimizations do not entail re-architecting the application itself.
- Lift and Shift, or migrating an application onto the cloud unchanged. You can take full advantage of some applications even when you do not change them as you move to the cloud. The good news is that if you are only rehosting an application, you can make use of tools that can automate the process. Another reason for rehosting? It would be easier to re-engineer an application when it is already on the cloud.
- Repurchasing, or using another product. For instance, using Workday instead of your own HR system, or junking your customer relationship management system for Salesforce.com
- Refactoring, re-engineering, and re-architecting. Refactoring would involve redesigning your application to use cloud-native features. If you have an application that you are hosting in house, chances are, that application would not have features that are meant for the cloud. If you are planning to migrate to Amazon AWS, then you could now add the cloud-only features you have always wanted to add!
- Retiring. One of the benefits of migration is that you will be forced to look at the applications you are using and not using. You might find that at least one in every ten applications is no longer being used. These applications may now be turned off and you can save money from these.
- Revisiting, or postponing your migration plans and looking more into it in the future. For some businesses, now might not be the best time to migrate. Just because everybody else is migrating does not mean that you should too. Move to the cloud only when it makes sense to do so.
For each of these migration strategies, there are Amazon services for you to use. The cloud service provider is also working on more tools that would help automate processes and make migration easier.
Orban also suggest that IT people should update their skills and learn new ones so that they could handle cloud technologies currently available and those that are coming out in the future. For instance, an IT staff could learn more about machine learning and artificial intelligence, which would allow the company to take advantage of both technologies that are offered as Amazon services.
As you might have guessed, migration is quite a major undertaking for any company. Even as Amazon AWS makes it easier for businesses to do the migration on their own, there are times when moving to the cloud is simply not easy. And this is the reason why you should work with expert teams from Four Cornerstone to help you every step of the way.
If you have plans to move to the cloud using AWS offerings, then call Four Cornerstone at
(817) 377-1144 or fill out our contact form. We can help you make the most out of your Amazon AWS investments and make migration even more simple and easier for you.
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