Whitepapers

Introduction

Have you ever ridden in a hot air balloon? The idea can be intimidating, but once you’ve experienced it, you realize it gently ascends and you hardly feel any movement even though you are quickly soaring up into the sky. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed at the thought of moving to AWS, but there are many cloud migration benefits and best practices to ensure a smooth process

Cloud Migration Benefits

Migrating to AWS brings many benefits for companies including cost reduction, increased security, modernization, resource reallocation, speed to market, and scalability.

• Reduce Costs: Clients typically experience 20-50% cost savings by moving from an on-premise environment to AWs. Cost savings includes both immediate and long-term cost savings. With Cloudnexa’s help, One Medical Passport reduced migration costs by 74%. Another client saved $120K in one month through CPA education and certification.

One Medical Passport successfully modernized their environment, reduced administrative overhead, increased overall security posture, and gained heightened visibility into workloads. One Medical Passport reduced costs by 74% and increased revenue by more than 30%

• Increase Security: Moving to AWS will increase your security and help facilitate your security compliance.
  • Enable compliance: By moving to the AWS cloud, clients inherit AWS’ extensive security compliance list including HIPAA, SOC, and FedRAMP.
  • Mitigate attacks: Moving to the cloud helps you design cost effectively to mitigate against attacks while developing the solution. Amazon’s CloudFront helps clients scale out while resolving issues immediately.
  • Benefit from AWS’ Security Services: AWS’ security services (for example, Security Hub, and Shield) are specific to the design environment which means you don’t have to procure them yourself—they’re already native to AWS. By bundling these into your design and deployment, it cost effectively simplifies your environment with many security layers in each layer, and security solutions to match. Leveraging end-point security’s (such as Cloudnexa’s partnership with Trend Microsystems) deep security service is another best practice.
  • Leverage a managed solution: In addition to AWS’ extensive security, leverage a managed solution such as Cloudnexa’s. Integrating Cloudscan will help automatically and quickly manage risks by finding misconfigurations and gaps. You will be able to proactively address issues before they happen. Choose an experienced partner like Cloudnexa to ensure your business continuity and disaster recovery is failsafe and that you’re in a recoverable state.
• Modernize your environment: There are several phases to modernize your environment. Each phase is an important step in your journey:
  • Phase I: Move to AWS.
  • Phase II: Migrate to cloud-native services such as PaaS and database as a service.
  • Phase III: Complete application modification to take advantage of a modern solution.
  • Phase IV: Leverage containers which bridge the gap between traditional application deployment and container deployment.
• Reallocate resources: Resource constraints are common, especially among SMB companies. By moving to the cloud, clients can reallocate internal resources, enabling them to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Cloudnexa has migrated over 250,000 workloads to AWS.

• Speed to productivity: Moving to AWS with the trusted guidance of an experienced partner like Cloudnexa will increase your speed to productivity. Experienced partners have the practical experience and knowledge and know what to avoid. As a best practice, they leverage automation to complete the migration. Cloudscan can also continually monitor and check your environment during build out to identify any misconfigurations. This helps avoid any need to rearchitect, saving you time and increasing speed to productivity.
• Scalability: Moving to AWS will increase your network, data, and security scalability. It’s important to take a realistic and practical approach to scalability, leveraging multiple phases. Choose a migration partner like Cloudnexa that will help you set achievable migration goals through a 6-month migration plan including testing and trail stages. Data is an important area to consult with a partner. Important focus areas including data, application, and network. It’s important to leverage Amazon CloudFront in your journey for edge computing to quickly achieve and enhance front-end scalability. During the Assessment stage, create a high-level architecture and complete blueprint of the AWS environment, broken down by each aspect such as network and database. Then establish what you will achieve during each phase. Another best practice is using decoupling. The more you do, the more you can scale. Try to decouple each layer of your application, separate out those application layers, and run on an independent infrastructure to achieve scalability.

Conclusion

While the thought of AWS migration can be intimidating, the benefits including cost reduction, increased security, modernization, resource reallocation, speed to market, and scalability are worth the journey. Cloudnexa is here to help you seamlessly and quickly migrate to the cloud. Start your journey by contacting us!