Companies migrate to the cloud for many different reasons and choose providers that best meet their unique needs. As a business strategy, AWS makes a lot of sense for many South African enterprises, as it not only enhances operations and improves security, but can also be very cost-effective if managed correctly, says Marilyn Moodley, Country Leader for South Africa and West, East, and Central Africa (WECA) at vendor-neutral cloud provider SoftwareOne. “Though we’re vendor neutral, we work closely with all three of the biggest hyperscalers – AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure – so we have a deep understanding of the unique advantages, funding support and other programmes each can offer you. AWS has a proven methodology to help organisations move to the cloud efficiently and cost-effectively, the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), and it can be very valuable to those considering or getting reading to move their operations to the cloud.”
How MAP works
MAP breaks the cloud migration journey down to three stages: 1) Assess, 2) Mobilise, and 3) Migrate and Modernise.
“As an AWS partner, we guide enterprises through each of these stages and make their migration as effective and cost-efficient as possible,” says Moodley.
The goal of the Assess stage is to build a detailed business case for migration. This defines the business drivers, hiring and training costs, decommissioning costs, tooling costs and sunk costs to create an accurate picture of total cost of ownership (TCO) over a period of up to 5 years. Key to this stage is the Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA). The goal of the OLA is to build an initial business case for migration, including a high-level picture of what the TCO will be to move existing workloads to AWS.
Moodley explains: “We start with a 30-day, light-touch, automated discovery process to understand what your current on-premises environment and Microsoft licensing position looks like. Using this information, we provide you with a high-level assessment of the TCO on AWS and recommendations for how to use your existing licenses. The TCO information will help you understand whether you qualify for one of the two MAP funding programmes: MAP Lite or MAP Large. For customers with 100+ servers, the OLA is paid for through AWS funding and is completed at no cost to your organisation.”
Next comes the Mobilise phase, where the outcome is a complete plan for the move to AWS. This involves establishing priorities for each of your on-premises applications based on which of the 10 so-called Rs applies best. Is the application a candidate for simple rehosting – a lift and shift where it’s migrated directly to the cloud with minor changes? Or is replatforming a better option, either a replatform (auto) that’s an automated migration or a replatform with some code changes to adjust applications for cloud infrastructure? Other Rs that might apply include refactor (migration with significant changes), relicense, retain, or retire.
“Choosing the right R is critical for a successful migration,” says Moodley. “For example, a lift and shift doesn’t necessarily bring all the values of cloud – and can end up being more expensive, depending on what your initial infrastructure looks like. SoftwareOne can evaluate your application landscape and carefully consider all 7 Rs to bring applications to the best target model aligned to your needs.”
In the Mobilise phase, AWS offers help with funding, covering up to 50% of the costs involved, either as an immediate discount or as a credit on future AWS consumption. Depending on the size of the workloads you end up migrating, you might also qualify for further AWS consumption discounts of 15% (MAP Lite) or 25% (MAP Large). After migration, you can expect to see significant efficiency improvements in infrastructure management by adding more automation, which will also help to reduce your costs going forward.
A practical partnership
One key benefit of migrating to AWS using the MAP with SoftwareOne’s guidance is the opportunity for ongoing improvement, says Moodley. “Our roots lie in licensing optimisation, and we have extensive experience in making sure you don’t pay more than necessary while also keeping applications up to date and effective. What’s more, we have wide expertise in many other areas as well: automation and serverless workloads, managed services, application modernisation, FinOps – which optimises cloud expenses and consumption – and more. We’re also unique in our ability to execute all 7 Rs – few other organisations can do that.”
One client, a publisher and science research organisation, had long relied on on-premises data centres, accumulating a lot of technical debt such as out-of-date operating systems, code and hardware, along with several support contracts approaching end of life. This made it increasingly difficult to meet user expectations for digital services and innovation.
Working with the SoftwareOne team, this organisation decided to migrate to AWS. Using the MAP programme, an in-depth business case for migration was created, along with a plan to manage business changes throughout the move. The move took place in two phases, with corporate workloads being moved first, followed by publishing workloads. SoftwareOne also built a landing zone for the move to AWS and developed solutions to accelerate the organisation’s pipelines for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
Since completing the migration, the organisation’s IT maintenance demands are significantly lower than before – the average saving on infrastructure costs by migrating to AWS is 31%. And they’ll continue saving while enjoying better efficiency and optimisation.
“Our team continues to support the businesses we work with by monitoring and managing its workloads to ensure they are compliant, secure, and continually improving,” says Moodley. “This frees up time for the organisation’s IT team to focus on innovating and optimising services.”
