Blogpost Series AWS Migration Part 1: The benefits of an optimization and licensing assessment when migrating workloads

When companies consider migrating workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS), it can be a major challenge to determine what should be moved, and how the workloads are sized in the cloud to fully realize their business goals. Organizations need to understand the implications of moving workloads, both in terms of how their systems and applications will work in the new environment, and also in terms of what this will mean for the licensing of the technology they use. In order to prepare a business case and a migration plan, one first needs to evaluate the existing infrastructure and get a clear view of the infrastructure data. An Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) does exactly this.

How Does an OLA Work to accelerate your migration? 

Over a period of typically 2–4 weeks, the company conducting the OLA will collect data on what is installed in an organization’s existing environment. The type of data collected includes CPU usage, RAM usage, and operating systems. This collection is supported by the AWS Migration Evaluator, which can operate completely offline.

By obtaining as much information as possible about the existing setup, the assessment enables organizations to gain an understanding of their current licensing situation and how it would change if they moved to a cloud-optimized alternative.

An OLA can therefore provide the customer with an idea of the costs of an on-premises implementation versus a cloud-based infrastructure. It also shows the costs across different AWS regions, instances, and payment models. These results are presented to the customer as a baseline to work from. The OLA provides a foundation for putting together a business plan and migration strategy based on the customer’s infrastructure and performance data.

This significantly speeds up the migration planning phase and enables more realistic migration plans.

The Benefits of an OLA with SPIRIT/21 

The major benefit of an OLA as a starting point for migrating workloads is that customers get an overview of their environment and how technology is currently used in their on-premises infrastructure.

SPIRIT/21 combines the information gathered from an OLA with our knowledge about different technologies on AWS, such as SAP on AWS, storage technologies, networking, and cloud-native development, to name only a few. As a result, this assessment helps customers get a comprehensive view of all of their workloads and provides a solid planning baseline for the migration journey to AWS.

An OLA is also invaluable in helping to right-size cloud environments to suit business needs and reduce costs. For example, one of our customers had 160 virtual machines in its on-premises environment, costing them an estimated $230,000 per year. An OLA showed that moving these directly to AWS without any right-sizing work would increase the cost to $277,000 (AWS Direct-Match). However, using the data collected as part of the OLA, SPIRIT/21 showed that, with right sizing, the cost could be reduced to $175,000 per year. Based on the gathered information and recommendations from SPIRIT/21, the company decided to proceed with the realization of its cloud migration strategy with high priority.

The information collected during the OLA can also be used as guidance in other areas after the migration to further optimize the new environment.

Access to AWS Funding to support the customer migration journey 

An OLA with SPIRIT/21 using AWS Migration Evaluator also provides organizations with the opportunity to learn how they might use funding from the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP).

Using our experience from conducting AWS OLAs and migrations for businesses of all sizes, SPIRIT/21 can provide guidance on the funding that is available. This helps clients to migrate their workloads as cost-effectively as possible.

With expertise gathered over many years, SPIRIT/21 provides the OLA your business needs to make the move to AWS as cost effective and efficient as possible. This will help your organization to make the most of your move to the cloud.

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