8 business drivers that motivate cloud migration

By migrating some or all of their digital assets to the cloud, businesses can achieve transformational results. They can move and innovate faster, modernise aging infrastructure, scale globally, get better insights from their data, and restructure organisational models to create better customer experiences.

AWS has compiled eight business drivers that it  views as the most prevalent motivators for migration as it  helps and partners with businesses and organisations.

Cost reduction

Cost reduction is the most popular migration motivator, as retiring legacy infrastructure in favour of more efficient AWS solutions is virtually certain to bring costs down.

A study  by International Data Corporation (IDC) showed  a 51% reduction in overall  cost of running these workloads with AWS versus comparable on-premise environments  in terms of  IT infrastructure, IT staff, and unplanned user downtime costs.

IDC estimates a 31% lower five-year cost of infrastructure versus a comparable on-premise environment for these organisations. These costs included licensing, power and facilities, and hardware costs, compared with AWS fees.

News Corp, AWS’ parent company saved or reallocated more than $100 million in costs by migrating 75% of  applications to the cloud as it consolidated 56 data centres into six and was able to realise its savings target in about two years.

Five-year cost of operations using AWS

Agility and staff productivity

Flexible AWS architecture improves business agility, while automation allows staff to increase the pace of innovation and dedicate more time to important tasks.

AWS customers are able to accelerate time to market, with an increased pace of experimentation and faster deployment of new features and applications with fewer errors.

Customers who move to AWS reduce the percentage of IT spend on infrastructure, freeing budget for reinvestment in other areas. By reducing or eliminating tasks that are no longer needed, teams are freed to work on higher value activities.

Improved security and operational resilience 

Migrating and modernising with AWS helps to improve security, and  protects against cyberattacks by defining, managing access policies, and preventing unauthorised disclosure and modification with encryption and policy-driven controls. AWS also helps ensure resiliency, providing high availability with virtually unlimited failover capacity.

Hardware and software end-of-life  

Many organisations migrate to AWS due to the end-of-life (EOL) of their hardware andsoftware licensing or support. These companies see the cloud as an opportunity to improve depreciating capabilities and to end or shorten refresh cycles. This is especially compelling for organisations running Windows workloads and applications. AWS runs nearly two times more Windows servers than the next largest cloud provider, according to the IDC report.

IDC projects that at these levels of benefits and costs, users  realised an average five-year return on investment (ROI) of 442% and broke even on their investment in  an average of nine months from the beginning of deployment.

Data centre consolidation   

Organisations can spend less time managing data centres and more time running their businesses by migrating to AWS.

“Migrating with…AWS allows us to move quickly and exit data centres while looking for ways to retire  or optimise our application portfolio,” said Paul Goldberg, chief information officer of AECOM, an infrastructure consulting firm.

Digital Transformation  

Migrating to AWS helps businesses achieve digital transformation by boosting agility, enabling broader use of advanced technologies, and facilitating culture change.

Swire Coca-Cola closed three on-premises production and disaster recovery data centres and migrated all of their business systems, including systems application and products (SAP) and customer relationship management (CRM), to AWS.

Ke Li, manager of cloud services and IT operations of Swire Coca-Cola stated, “We achieved digital transformation of our IT systems, which can serve…hundreds of millions of consumers rather than the previous 10,000 sales representatives”.

Going global quickly, mergers & acquisitions (M&A)

AWS customers gain access to a global network of data centers—enabling rapid, strategic scalability. AWS also makes it easier to integrate digital assets, shortening and streamlining M&A procedures.

According to Harvard Business Review, 71% of US companies believe that technology integration determines the success of M&A deals.

“Our agility to go to market and being able to quickly and seamlessly change and improve the way we deliver IT services to support the growth of (our) business has led to outstanding results,” said Lia Taylor, chief technology officer of John Holland, an Australian engineering and construction company.

New technologies (AI, ML and IoT)

Migrating to AWS is a more economical and practical solution for meeting the data storage and computational requirements of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and the internet of things (IoT).

Using AWS CloudFormation, Intuit, a global technology platform effectively deployed infrastructure as code, allowing different teams to coordinate in an easy, frictionless way.

Vantage Power worked with Luxoft, an AWS Partner Network Advanced Consulting partner and AWS IoT Competency partner, to create a telemetry platform called VPVision, which brings the AWS cloud platform to each connected vehicle.

“Together with Vantage Power and using AWS, Luxoft has developed a solution that can provide incredible insights and value using the data from connected vehicles. Within seconds, complex data is transformed into actionable information and shown on the platform”, stated Sam Mantle, managing director of digital enterprise at Luxoft, a global digital strategy, IT, and software engineering firm. 

No matter what motivates businesses to migrate to the cloud—one of the eight drivers, any combination of them, or something else entirely, it is important that they can adopt to these changes will less friction and the results can bring added value to their organisations. 

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