Every Migration Is Unique
Where we begin every cloud transformation is as unique as the company itself. Some companies are looking to significantly reduce infrastructure costs. Others are looking to increase speed and agility. Before we get into the details of how you should adopt the cloud, we first want to understand why.
Our engagements are designed to build a migration plan with based on business drivers, to ensure that that your are getting the best outcome possible. This also help us ensure that we’re rationalizing your workloads for quick wins, and working with your team towards a plan that they are excited about.
Common Drivers
Cost Reduction
Agility + Staff Productivity
Platform flexibility and agility: Changes in market conditions, client needs and scope are far more easily resolved when infrastructure is a fluid concept rather than fixed cost and hardware.
More meaningful staffing: Without the need to staff for the purposes of keeping managed services and core infrastructure running, staffing can focus on innovation and meaningful output
Security and Resilience
Platform security: AWS’ offers an extremely secure platform with class-leading security measures for encryption, access control, network security and virtualization security.
Compliance and attestation: Each AWS service offering is meticulously documented, including security compliance attestation. Need to know which services are SOC, PCI, FedRAMP or HIPAA compliant? Easy, it’s all in the documentation!
Digital Transformation
Modernization approaches: Perhaps the greatest benefit to migrating a workload into AWS is the potential to change its shape entirely. Workloads can achieve enormous savings in time, effort, maintenance and cost by virtue of becoming something entirely new as the result of migration efforts.
Unparalleled integration: AWS offers an enormous count of several hundred services based on existing and developing technology that already exists within your business practice today.
Why Migrate With Us?
We’ve helped hundreds of organizations successfully adopt the cloud. Over the last decade, we’ve built cloud service organizations, sought out sustainable technology practices and developed innovative solutions alongside our clients and partners.
We’ve seen common challenges, successes and failures of implementing cloud transformation across every industry vertical, all while witnessing the role that people and culture play in the outcome. We certainly love technology, but our true passion is people – people who want to seed adoption and create sustainable change within their organizations.
We offer a holistic approach to cloud migrations that focuses on desired business outcomes, capabilities and ensuring teams are set up to successfully operate AWS Cloud workloads in a post-migration state. We provide services that guide our customers through every step of the journey from migration planning, to optimizing workloads for cost, to helping cut ribbons at go-live. Protagona performs and partners with businesses for the entirety of their AWS Cloud migrations.
Choosing the right partner to support your cloud migration will help ensure that your journey into the AWS cloud navigates around common pitfalls, and instead follows a measured, structured approach. Protagona uses only the most robust of proven and refined strategies for AWS Cloud migrations that have been developed through years of making customers happy.
AWS and Protagona have a proven track record in supporting small, medium and enterprise businesses through every stage of their AWS Cloud migration. Our combined experience and partnership accelerates the process without undue business interruption, delivering greater cost and operational efficiency.
Our 3-Phase Migration Approach
1
Assess
In the assess phase, Protagona helps to discover your on-premises, co-located or cloud workload and build a right-sized and optimized cost projection for running workloads in AWS. Protagona and AWS offer services and tolls that can help, along with a breadth of experience helping many companies like yours plan this journey.
- The AWS Migration Readiness Assessment – an AWS provided process of gaining insights into how far along you are in your cloud journey, understanding your current cloud readiness strengths and weaknesses, and then building an action plan to close identified caps.
- AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) – a guide to help ensure that organizations have a holistic view of the transformation initiative that is required for an effective move to the cloud.
2
Mobilize
In the Mobilize phase, Protagona and AWS help address gaps in your organization’s readiness that were discovered in the assessment phase, with a focus on building your baseline environment and landing zone, driving operational readiness and developing cloud skills.
Here too, Protagona and AWS offer services, tools and experience that can help:
- AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness – A tool that helps you develop plans for your cloud adoption based on your migration readiness.
- AWS Migration Hub – A service that automates planning and tracking application migration across multiple AWS and Partner tooling, allowing you to choose the migration tools that best fit your workload and needs.
3
Migrate & Modernize
During the Migrate & Modernize phase, each of your workloads will be designed, migrated, and validated.
AWS Migration Hub enables you to get progress updates quickly across all of your migrations, easily identify and troubleshoot any issues, and reduce the overall time and effort spent on your migration projects.
For many workloads, the best approach is to move rapidly to the cloud, then rearchitect within AWS. Using AWS’s Application Migration Service (MGN), vast swathes of infrastructure and application footprint can be easily and quickly re-hosted or replatformed in AWS.
Many businesses use migration as a valuable opportunity to perform much-needed modernization of their infrastructure and application footprint, by re-factoring existing legacy technology. Some proven strategy for doing so include:
- Infrastructure automation (elastic infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, containerization)
- Agile development practices (DevOps, testing and automation engineering, CI/CD practices, observability tooling)
- Cloud-native architectural patterns (stateless, microservice architecture, serverless, datalakes vs databases)
- Windows modernization, database modernization, and product-based operating models (product teams, business outcome alignment, full-stack vs platform structures)
The Seven "R's" of Cloud Migration
There’s more than one way to migrate an infrastructure, an application or an entire workload. Common migration patterns usually follow one of six standard patterns – but when migrating to AWS, you’ll gain an additional 7th option to relocate. This is what is known as “The Seven R’s of Cloud Migration”.
Creating a detailed strategy that identifies the characteristics of the workload to be migrated, the needs of the business and stakeholders, as well as the desired journey for migration is all part of the plan. Each migration performed by Protagona is by prescription and tailored to meet the business objectives of your organization.
Below are the details on each of these seven patterns as we see them most commonly adopted by our customers.
Rehost
Known commonly in-industry as “lift-and-shift“, in a large-scale migration scenario where you may need to migrate and scale quickly to meet a business case this may be applicable as a suitable pathway.
Commonly seen as a heavy expedition technique, you’re likely to see rehost used when time is of the essence (i.e. data center lease termination, compliance or governance mandate deadlines)
Most rehosting can be automated or at the very lease, heavily expedited through the use of tooling such as AWS’ Server Migration Service or Application Migration Service (MGN). Tooling like this makes it easier, faster and less burdensome to migrate thousands of on-premises workloads into AWS using some very cutting edge live-replication features that make cutting over to AWS infrastructure a breeze.
Replatform
Sometimes referred to as “lift-tinker-and-shift“, this entails making a few AWS-targeted optimizations to achieve measurable benefits but without making comprehensive changes to architecture or core functionality. Very typically this entails migrating an existing self-managed solution into an AWS managed service solution that is compatible or runs on the same underlying technology. This might look like:
- Migrating an on-premises message queue to either AWS MQ or AWS SQS depending on interoperation
- Migrating on-premises shared networked volumes to AWS EFS or AWS FSx depending on platform requirements
- Migrating an on-premises MySQL 8.0 database into an AWS Aurora for MySQL 8.0 cluster
Refactor
Change the way that applications are architected and developed by taking full advantage of cloud-native features such as data lakes, distributed stateless compute, cloud-only consumption methods such as spot bidding, etc.
Refactoring (sometimes referred to as re-architecting) is driven by the requirements to add features, improve scalability, or increase performance in ways that otherwise would be unachievable in traditional non-cloud environments.
This typically involves an application being broken down to fundamental components to be understood at the level of base requirements, and then restructured into an entirely new architecture. With an increasing amount of frequency, we’re seeing core application logic and code survive this change and be housed in a shiny new form-factor.
Relocate
This is a term often used to describe like-for-like migrations into AWS involving partnered services that mirror managed service offerings in AWS such as VMWare Cloud on AWS. Migrations that follow this strategy typically see zero application changes as the underlying managed service has been built with a heavy emphasis on compatibility.
Customers who take the relocate path when migrating to AWS often see the quickest turnaround at the cost of not taking the fullest advantage of the benefits that AWS can provide to a workload.
Repurchase
Replace your current environment, casually referred to as “drop-and-shop”. This is a decision to move to a newer version of software or purchase an entirely new solution. You may also be looking for a new software licensing model that allows you more flexibility to match your business needs.
As an example, Amazon connect can be purchased to replace a contact center application.
Retain
Do nothing, for now. You may have portions of your IT portfolio that aren’t yet ready for a migration or are best kept on-premises for now.
Keep in mind that, as more of your portfolio moves to the cloud, allocation of data center expenses across fewer workloads may eventually drive the need to revisit the retained workloads.
For workloads that remain on-premises, AWS Outposts brings the same hardware and software that AWS provides, in-house to be consumed on-premises.
Retire
Decommission or archive unneeded portions of your IT portfolio. During the assess phase, you may encounter applications or infrastructure that are typically referred to as “zombies”. These are no longer used and with rationalization of your portfolio, may no longer be useful to maintain and can be turned off.