Migration to Cloud Computing - Why Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the Best Choice

The world is progressing towards portable technologies, from mobile phones to remote work, to an easy lifestyle.

Accessing secure data is the most stressful job for an organization, but cloud computing, especially Amazon Web Services, makes this tedious task just a piece of cake.

Proven and experienced by millions, AWS eliminates the challenges of all types of organizations by empowering the migration of workloads to the cloud. From an on-premises environment, hosting facility, or another public cloud, you may transfer any workload – apps, websites, databases, storage, physical or virtual servers – and even whole data centers to AWS. You can use AWS capabilities and potential to strengthen your organizational, operational, and technological competence at every step of the route, allowing you to obtain business benefits faster.

Need for Cloud Migration - Migrate to AWS Cloud

Information on the cloud is very dynamic and centralized, enabling users to access it anytime, anywhere on the web, surpassing the hurdle of getting information from physical data centers only. Plus, wherever fortune calls for rescaling or down the current storage capacities, data information, and user count, the cloud is flexible enough to achieve whatever comes your way.

The cloud has become the new normal as organizations of all sizes have realized its advantages. For most businesses, the question is no longer "if," but rather "how quickly can we move?" "And what are we going to move first?". So here goes the discussion over migration benefits on AWS cloud.

Benefits of Migrating to AWS Cloud

The market for cloud services has risen exponentially. According to Gartner's 2019 research report, the graph of revenue growth for cloud services is expected to rise from $227 billion in 2019 to $354 billion in 2022. Guess who is dominating the market? Yes, of course! AWS it is.

Many multinational companies have successfully moved their on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS cloud migration benefits them from lower IT infrastructure costs, high productivity, agile business processes, and improved operational resilience.

AWS reported the data from migrating to the AWS cloud, including:

• 31% Infrastructure cost saving
• 62% High Tech Productivity
• 94% Time reduces at running back-end
• 3x More Features Launched Per Year

- Sustainability

Sustainability can only be possible when there is optimum utilization of resources. What makes AWS more efficient than regular data centers is that it can save 3.5 times more energy, comparatively.

- Eliminate unnecessary costs

One of the significant reasons behind migrating the existing server storage process to AWS is to reduce the unnecessary costs companies used to spend. As an SMB grows and its current IT infrastructure demands increase, considerable hardware and administrative infrastructure expenditures arise. Whether or not more systems are incorporated, managing them puts additional strain on the IT staff. Other IT hires are likely to be made.

Different assets from the cloud are only made available upon request. You may scale up and down based on your existing loads, and you can optimize TOC in real-time.

- Value to business

Migrating to AWS cloud brings value to your business; A fact released in IDC's report shows that companies spend 31% less on infrastructure with AWS than with diverse other server solutions.

- Scalability

When your system has the infinite capacity to scale, it reflects business growth too. Cloud has the limitless storage capacity to run your application with total efficiency. Business scale by acquiring new users and retaining more existing customers. The increasing number of customer demands for restructuring with more features and multiplying the running capacity of existing applications.

- Speedy performance and Agile approach

Businesses can build and deploy apps faster by gaining near-instant access to nearly unlimited computing capacity. In essence, software providers can use the Software-as-a-Service method to deliver their products to clients, eliminating the need to install the software locally or manage their own internal data centers.

- Data security

AWS facilitates built-in security tools. The same report from IDC also mentioned that AWS laaS can handle 43% of threats and other uncertain breach events for a company.

If you're transferring your valuable data over the cloud, security concerns arise, but this is no longer the case. After using cloud services, 94% of companies have seen an increase in data security. When you transfer your crucial data to AWS, you gain access to the best security practices by default.

The majority of security fixes and upgrades may be installed with little to no oversight and, in many cases, remotely. However, anytime a potential threat emerges, your important colleagues will be quickly alerted to initiate an investigation.

Also Read: How Cloud Computing is Changing the World of Fintech

Journey of Migrating Your Existing Applications to AWS Cloud

Businesses take the transformational route to success by migrating their digital data to the cloud. This disruptive move can let the organization scale globally, get better insights from the data, innovate faster, restructure technology infrastructure at low cost, and provide a remarkable customer experience.

Change is the only constant thing, a change for a better future. However, choosing the topmost AWS cloud-computing services brings its perks to the table. AWS offers myriad cloud computing services, but here we take you through the fundamental phases of migration appropriate for migrating any AWS cloud project. Amazon Web Services provides a dedicated migration program to simplify the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) deployment process.

- Business Planning Phase

One should examine the current financial and technical resources, ongoing applications, existing infrastructure issues, costs, and business-specific needs. Once you gather all the information relevant to migration, you need to plan a project migration roadmap, prioritize migration applications, check server status, and plan backlog.

Also, we need to cross-check the acquired data with the application owner and migration team for apps that require restructuring and those that do not require changes (like Rehost Apps) that need a lift and shift to the cloud.

- Discovery Phase

Optimize the cloud migration process by exploring the best possible tools to migrate required applications over the AWS cloud. AWS offers various tools that can assist with migration. Get a clear understanding of AWS migration tools such as Server Migration Service(SMS), Amazon DirectConnect, and Database Migration Service (DMS), which might be relevant for your use case.

- Designing, Migrating and Validating Phase

Migrating design involves the creation of an architectural plan for AWS, Infrastructure, applications to migrate, and supporting processes and tools.

At this stage, experts need to conceptualize AWS strategies and analyze the performance of migrating tools utilized to migrate applications. This analytical process involves outlining data flow, external and internal resource consumption, cross-checking design methods, and foundational elements. Then, with buy-in from your organization's stakeholders, move forward with a thorough migration plan.

Evaluation assures the worth of migration; before the team releases migrated applications over AWS cloud, they need to validate each app based on their functionalities, speed of performance, workflow continuity, and disaster recovery capacity. Chances of failure may arise in the migration environment, and you will need to double-check the launch plan and parallel application testing because it's always better late than never. Exceptionally, if the migration fails, the team needs to roll back strategies.

- Operating Phase

This phase calls for monitoring the performance of running applications migrated to the cloud and ceased operating current versions. Successful migration counts on the user acceptability of AWS cloud applications. If operational efficiency is on the up and up, it means AWS cloud-integrated applications give desired results.

When you know about the benefits of data transition to AWS, you must understand the best tools used in migration. Indeed, migration is a tedious task to perform for any established organization.

However, middleware software will help you migrate applications and your workload to the AWS cloud with the least effort. AWS comes with some valuable migrating tools:

• AWS Migration Hub - A Hub, a platform where you can plan, execute, and track the migration of applications and databases.
• Migration Evaluator (Initially, it was TSO Logic) - An analyzing tool speeds up the process of examining data from current resources and helps transfer applications and databases to the AWS cloud at the lowest cost of ownership.
• Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART) - A questioning tool to check whether you and your business are ready to adopt cloud management or not. It comes with a 16-question online survey that produces a final report with results and recommendations on readiness for AWS cloud migration.
• AWS Application Discovery Services - A useful software for analyzing on-premise systems (including ongoing workflow, existing infrastructure setups, connectivity with networks, and available resources) and calculating the cost before migrating to AWS. This platform works in conjunction with AWS Migration Hub to help you keep track of your mobile data.
• AppDynamics - An easy-to-use performance management tool that supports on-premise, SaaS, private, and hybrid settings, as well as AWS monitoring.
• AWS Server Migration Service (SMS) - Large enterprises have enormous data on multiple systems, and executing the transfer of massive databases is not a piece of cake; that's why AWS is called the Lion of the market. AWS integrates with tools that help you automate, manage, coordinate, and track large workload volumes from the current server location to the AWS cloud with minimal network bandwidth.
• AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) - An easy-to-use service for migrating data from popular open-source and commercial databases to Amazon services.
• CloudEndure Migration - An automatic solution for moving apps, physical, virtual, and cloud servers to your AWS account that simplifies and lowers costs.
  

Also Read: Role of Cloud Computing in Logistics - Benefits & Limitations

Final Thoughts

AWS is a very vast concept to discuss; here, we have given you insights on why cloud migration is needed and what makes Amazon Web Services the recognized player for transferring your current workload to the cloud. It leverages business with a more flexible working environment, less investment in technology budget, reliability, scalability, and unbreakable security for all companies.