It’s midway through 2022, and we still have CIOs concerned with staff productivity and agility, not to mention concerns from the VPs of infrastructure to scale the business globally and reduce cost.
Many companies, however, are still struggling to have a clear strategy and a roadmap for their cloud transformation journey, something that could address those and other issues faced by companies big and small. In this scenario, the letters that are you looking for are M, A, and P.
To encourage more businesses to choose their brand and services, Amazon has invested in a program to help accelerate migrations — the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP). In this article, we will present more information about it and how BRQ can help your business.
What is migration, anyway? It’s a movement of one part of something to another. The fundamental process around it is understanding the benefits of the new system, assessing gaps in the existing system, planning, and then migrating.
The idea of migrating IT assets to the cloud can be intimidating because of the change management required. That is one of the reasons why companies implement DevOps in their culture: this methodology is crucial during the integration between development teams and operations.
IT environments have become larger and more complex, and organizations rarely have the opportunity to retire their technical debt as they continue to build new systems. The decision to migrate to the cloud can be driven by several factors, including:
- data center lease expiration;
- required hardware upgrades;
- software license renewals;
- location requirements to meet regulatory compliance;
- global market expansion;
- increased developer productivity or the need for a standard architecture.
What is the AWS Migration Acceleration Program?
The Migration Acceleration Program by Amazon (or just AWS MAP) is a program developed to help businesses migrate their programs and applications, a.k.a. “workloads”, to AWS, quickly and efficiently.
The program includes a process for assessing your current workloads, estimating the effort of migrating those workloads, and for the client to obtain funding in the form of financial credits to help minimize the burden of migrating these workloads.
Vendors in the cloud infrastructure services market visualize a huge opportunity in helping customers accelerate their cloud adoption. To encourage more businesses to choose their portfolio of web services, Amazon started the AWS MAP.
How does the MAP program work?
Initially, we should assist you in evaluating whether or not certain areas, functions or applications from your company are ready to migrate to a cloud environment. Then, we can jointly build a plan to get your workloads ready to migrate and then execute the migration itself. These phases are meant to isolate challenges and reduce the complexity and costs of migration and improve your chances of success.
Assess your readiness
First of all, we are going to study the gaps in your workloads. Then, we build a total cost of ownership (TCO) model to determine whether or not a migration makes financial sense for your business.
Prepare to migrate
Next, it’s time to determine the steps we need to take to complete a successful migration and prioritize the workload order with you.
Migrate and streamline your tags
At last, your workloads will be migrated, as long as we can ensure that they’re correctly tagged for them to count for financial credits.
Why should you care about the AWS migration acceleration program?
Businesses should care about this type of initiative because it helps to alleviate change costs. As your company, ITs programs, and applications grow, so will your infrastructure costs. But to change from one cost model (on-premises) to another (cloud), companies must invest in the change process.
Understanding the gains from the program
The financial benefits you mainly gain from participating in the AWS MAP conducted by an AWS Business Partner are not guaranteed. If your workloads aren’t tagged, you won’t get credits for them, and AWS won’t retroactively provide credits for workloads tagged after they’ve been migrated, for example.
A competent partner, like BRQ, will make sure everything is tagged properly before it’s migrated, so you can get the credits. However, the program is much more than this. As Stephen Orban, Head of Enterprise Strategy at AWS says, “migrating IT portfolios to the cloud is only the beginning of what is possible.”
How can BRQ help your company?
While there are several common components found in each successful migration, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to deciding on the best approach.
BRQ Digital Solutions has combined its knowledge about migrations with the experience gained from helping organizations move their IT portfolios to the cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS) processes, tools, and best practices.
When your company embarks on a Cloud Transformation Journey with the aid of BRQ to engage AWS using the MAP program, you will receive all technical support for each phase.
Assessment
In order to mobilize your workforce and resources to migrate your enterprise at scale, you must first assess your readiness and inventory your portfolio. These steps enable you to build a business case with the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics, and to align key stakeholders and leadership on business goals.
Partners such as BRQ have to go through intense technical and commercial training, certification and examination to be selected as part of the program.
Details of the potential financial benefits for companies looking to become customers are not to be made public, but we want to make sure you get all the financial benefits available, in case your projects fit the bill.
BRQ Digital Solutions will run the Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) workstream during this phase with you. The project work under an SOW with this goal may be subject to the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) funding, reducing or even eliminating this cost to the customer, you. The Rapid Discovery, the TCO Report, a Migration Briefing, and the RMBC are some of the outcomes of this phase.
Did you enjoy the article and would you like to know more? Let us guide you through a few questions, to help determine what kind of assistance you would need and where is your company in its cloud journey. So, feel free to fill out our Cloud Strategy Assessment!
