With consumers worldwide moving online and demanding access to services around the clock, organizations will need to modernize their IT and application architectures so they have the agility to continuously innovate and speed up their go-to-market efforts.
The global pandemic has further underscored the need for this transformation, as businesses seek out greater efficiencies to drive down costs and support new work practices. Modernizing their IT environments also enables them to better identify market opportunities and more quickly develop and push out new features.
Key to this is the adoption of DevOps practices and continuous integration/continuous delivery engineering pipelines, which help automate the development, testing and deployment of business applications.
Cloud provides the best platform to do this, enabling the tools and services that organizations need to roll out operational changes.
And while IT modernization helps transform legacy systems, processes and workloads as they migrate to the cloud, application modernization taps cloud-native systems to drive a more intelligent and agile way of using data and developing software.
The journey towards modernization, however, can be challenging, as organizations often lack the know-how and tools to navigate their way through without incurring additional costs. They need to be able to identify potential risks and address the complexity so their application modernization efforts will actually yield the business benefits they seek.
Overcoming Barriers to Business Modernization
Having the right modernization plan can enable you to migrate faster and smarter, with minimal downtime. For instance, building a foundation in cloud operations will help your team transition to managing, monitoring and continually optimizing your new cloud resources.
Your migration strategy also should include a review of the tools and services you will need to efficiently move your servers, applications and data to the cloud. In addition, assess your workloads to identify those that should be prioritized to glean the most benefit from cloud-native services and infrastructure.
Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) offer various tools and programs to ease their customers' transition. AWS has helped more than 1 million businesses successfully move applications and data to the cloud, including mission-critical workloads that consume the most resources on premises and in data centers.
These include Windows, SAP, VMware and Oracle workloads, for which AWS has designed tools, services and programs to simplify the migration process. In fact, AWS has hosted twice as many Windows Server instances than any other cloud platform.
Organizations also gain higher performance running their SQL Server workloads on AWS. Benchmark tests from Principled Technologies revealed that an EC2 R5b.8xlarge instance processed twice as many new orders per minute as the next largest cloud provider.
Customers also can work with validated AWS Partners such as Anchor Systems to navigate their modernization journey. Anchor’s engineers can plan, design and deploy Windows-based workloads on the cloud and guide the migration journey toward AWS.
An Australian engineering services provider, Anchor helps small and midsize businesses build and operate their IT requirements with AWS cloud best practices. It uses tools such as AWS Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA) to assess and optimize the customer's existing on-premises and cloud environments.
Deploying on AWS Cloud, for instance, can reduce an organization's payback period to six months and further slash total cost of ownership by 64%. AWS helps achieve this by aligning customers' application modernization and cloud migration plans based on their business requirements, and not on agreements or licensing.
OLA is offered at zero cost to customers and involves engagement with Anchor’s pre-sales engineers. Carried out in under a month, the assessment arms organizations with licensing-optimized cost models so they can make informed decisions for migrating their Microsoft workloads to AWS.
OLA also works together with the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Windows, which offers the tools, support, funds and resources businesses need during any cloud migration.
Without these and proper guidance from experienced AWS and Anchor professionals, organizations may face several common pitfalls in their cloud migration, which can prove costly. For one, many enterprises do not fully understand governance around cloud, having become accustomed to running workloads that are ring-fenced in data centers.
Also, the shortage of skill sets has severely impacted IT sectors in the Asia-Pacific region, especially as borders have remained largely shut during the pandemic. Cloud vendors and their partners, such as AWS and Anchor, can help plug the gaps and guide businesses in building and executing a migration roadmap.
This can involve making decisions around whether to re-host or re-architect applications, during which tools such as AWS OLA and MAP play a critical role in helping businesses choose the best option.
Begin your cloud migration and modernization journey with AWS and Anchor
