Amazon Web Services (AWS) earned more than $12 billion in sales for its most recent fiscal year, a 55 percent increase from the prior year, maintaining a 40 percent market share. Gartner reported that “AWS remains the dominant market leader, not only in IaaS, but also in integrated IaaS+PaaS, with a revenue run rate of more than $14 billion.”
Financial and Competitive Advantages of the Cloud
Why is AWS growing so fast? A study of 10 companies by IDC research analysts found that “Amazon customers will capture five-year business benefits worth over $1.5 million per application they are running in the AWS environment, and earn a return on their investment in AWS of 560 percent.”
In addition to the financial benefits of a pay-as-you-go IT infrastructure, and the opportunity for enterprises to get out of the data center business, there are many competitive benefits for moving to the cloud.
Rob Alexander, CEO of Capital One told Computerworld about why the credit card and banking giant moved its infrastructure to AWS. “We need to be a high-productivity software engineering organization,” Alexander said. “The winners in banking are going to be really great technology companies.” Alexander also told the AWS re:Invent crowd that AWS “enables us to operate more securely in the public cloud than we can even in our own private data centers.”
AWS has achieved its leadership position by solving truly difficult challenges with best-in-class technology and practices for migration to the cloud and for managing cloud resources. Amazon recognizes that moving to the cloud involves far more than technology, and gives us a robust set of tools to turn a cloud migration into a digital transformation for businesses.
Cloud Migration Challenges
But moving to the cloud isn’t easy. An article in Nextgov with the headline “Almost Half of IT Migrations Doomed to Fail,” found that 44 percent of companies had experienced a migration failure, and 66 percent experienced a migration delay. We’ve helped hundreds of companies successfully move to AWS using the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF).
Check out our video on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and Migration Strategies.
The AWS CAF is one of the tools AWS uses to support smooth migrations to the cloud. There are six areas of focus it calls “perspectives” that makeup the framework. The areas of focus include:
- The Business Perspective. It starts with understanding your organization’s current state, processes, goals, and resources. For example, a goal for most businesses is not to manage a data center, it’s to optimize business value with cloud adoption.
- The People Perspective. This perspective provides guidance for how to define the roles and skills needed for cloud migration and management, and how to update communication, organizational processes, and training to support new business processes.
- The Governance Perspective. Governance is where IT and business outcomes meet and stay in sync with consistent IT decision-making and risk management to create an efficient, secure, and compliant technology environment.
- The Platform Perspective. Migrating and managing cloud services is iterative. It is important to continually optimize the infrastructure. You don’t have to be afraid to try new things–if something doesn’t work, you can start over.
- The Security Perspective. Security in the cloud is shared. This perspective outlines the skills and processes needed to ensure resources deployed or developed in the cloud align to the organization’s security control, resiliency, and compliance requirements.
- The Operations Perspective. Cloud computing blurs the line between operations and IT. This perspective helps both organizations understand and update the skills and processes needed to ensure business systems and operational health though the move to the cloud.
The AWS CAF helps organizations understand how cloud adoption will transform the way they work, and it provides structure to identify and address gaps in skills and processes. Applying the CAF gives you a clear, actionable plan with fully defined work streams to guide the migration and beyond. This is where you get the value of Amazon’s best practices– to accelerate development and your business.
We’ve been working with the CAF since its inception and using it to help companies get the most value from the cloud before, during and after the migration, with minimal disruption, cost, and time. Check out the video for more information on how to build your Cloud Adoption Framework and Migration Strategies and contact us if you need help accelerating your cloud adoption strategy.
