Enterprise Roadmap to AWS Cloud – 5 Points to Consider

Excerpts of talk by BlazeClan at AWS Summit Mumbai 2013

With a lot of focus and mention, Cloud suddenly has become not just a de-facto topic within enterprise IT leadership but a serious thought.  Enterprise leaders are now realizing that the cloud story is here to stay and something that enterprise IT should start focusing on.

I felt this vibe at the AWS Summit in Mumbai yesterday, where I was presenting the topic “Enterprise Roadmap to AWS”. With sessions lined up through the day which focused on various services that AWS is now providing and leading up to the new “high profile” features like SAP certification and “Data-Warehousing as a Service” Redshift, my session was place just in time to make Enterprise IT leaders attending the Summit understand its use in practicality.

The session was an honest opinion based on time spent over the last couple of years talking to CIOs, CTOs and IT leaders as well as our overall understanding of the AWS application areas.

The session started with the pain points that CIOs face today while considering cloud, namely :

• What do you start with to move to cloud?
• How can cloud drive considerable cost and agility benefits for your organization?
• Does cloud seamlessly integrate with existing workload technologies?

With these thoughts, I focused on the immediate areas to invest in cloud which the CIO organization can reap benefits from immediately and show the results to the CFOs and stakeholders :

1. Hardware Refresh : One of the best times to look towards cloud migration is when the existing in-house hardware exhausts its life cycle and needs replacement. A more prudent approach than going back to the hardware vendor to check upon his costs for a newer hardware replacement, which is sure to come with an added price tag and possibly with an upgrade ( which may or may not be compatible with existing software stacks & licenses, hence added complexities ) is to look to migrate to cloud.  Subtract to it the new costs of AMC (annual maintenance contracts).

2. Web Applications : CIOs are always flooded with requests from development teams or business functions for the following requests :

• Self-contained Web Applications
• Social Media Product Marketing Campaigns
• Customer Training Sites
• Video Portals (Transcoding and Hosting)
• Pre-sales Demo Portal
• Software Downloads
• Trial Applications

One of the best possible ways is to start using or enable the users to use cloud services for these requirements, rather than figure out hardware space and available licenses.

3. Green field applications : On the wishlist in any enterprise is sure to be a bunch of new applications either from the customer engagement perspective or business function perspective. For any CIO this is a huge area of concern as he is not always in a position to allocate resources or have budgets to procure upfront licenses to enable such applications to come to life.

The cloud brings in an excellent opportunity where such wish-lists can be performed in a much better manner and at costs whereby trials and final deployments can be made.

4. Test and Development Applications : Not all organizations can afford to keep test environments as big as church for Easter mass, ready to test applications or load test workloads.

The cloud provides a better alternative and an easier approach to do these test runs and changes as well as stress/load test the applications before final deployments.

As this was sinking in within the attendee CIOs, I decided to move in a direction opposite and also give them a view of what workloads and applications they should not think of moving to the cloud immediately :

• Legacy, Monolithic, Horizontal
• Home grown CRMs
• License & compatibility
• Complex

These are complex workloads built over months if not years of changes and modifications and need major changes to suit the cloud migration. ROIs on these will not be immediate. Rather CIOs should focus on the following steps :

• Plan to Migrate first
• Pick Low hanging fruits
• Plan carefully to Migrate complex applications
• Plan over 6–12 months

Then I shifted my focus on the heart of any enterprise IT, the ERP and enterprise workloads. Today AWS supports major enterprise licenses and configurations through ISV partnerships, including SAP, Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, Suse and the like.

For a detailed view of the same, please visit aws.amazon.com/enterprise

I shared with the audience an interesting story about how an Income Tax department clarification got the enterprise IT scouting for records 8-10 years back in their taped archival data, only to find that the vendor had lost it due to fungus growth on the tape. This led me to the final point in enterprise migration:

5. Backup and DR: Today AWS cloud provides the right mix and environments for enterprises to plan and migrate their warm or cold backups to multi-region or multiple-AZ destinations. Disaster recovery from existing on-premise hardware to AWS cloud or from one AWS location to the other is extremely quick and takes matter of minutes. For a detailed read on Backup and DR check our blog.

The next few minutes of the presentation focused on the process developed by BlazeClan with a 3-D approach of optimizing time and costs of migration vs the efficiency gained.

Please click here for  BlazeClan’s cloud migration process and approach.

Also, check out this infographic which highlights our phase wise approach to migration i.e. Plan | Deploy | Optimize

I left the audience with few case studies, which gave them a practical view of some existing migration case studies and ROIs seen by enterprises.

Click to view an in depth twitter feed compilation of this talk as it happened in the AWS Summit.

Watch the presentation on Slideshare.

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