Find Out if AWS Is Right for Your Organization with a CDW LEADS Assessment

When you deploy workloads on AWS, choosing the right licencing directly impacts cost, performance and scalability. Many organizations migrate their software to the cloud under the assumption that their existing licences will carry over seamlessly, only to face unexpected limitations, such as described below.

Without taking additional licencing costs and unused licences into consideration, organizations may not be able to justify their cloud investment. Their actual operating expenses may end up being significantly higher than expected, which may affect their financial projections.

Beyond cost efficiency, licencing also affects how well workloads run in the cloud.

For example, some enterprise software licences may restrict virtualization or require dedicated hardware, which could prevent organizations from leveraging AWS’ fully elastic infrastructure.

Therefore, it is necessary to understand which licences to buy, what is the right volume and how to configure them for achieving your desired infrastructure performance.

From exploring how your infrastructure is set up to sizing your resources to meet your needs, the following four steps can help you optimize your AWS cloud TCO.

To get a detailed picture of your current infrastructure costs, the first step is to audit your resource consumption. This can be done by gathering data about the services used by your production workloads.

For on-premises workloads, software solutions like RVTools can help gather metrics on various performance metrics such as CPU utilization, network health and memory consumption.

These metrics can be used to chart usage patterns for answering important cloud cost questions such as:

• How many of your resources constantly go out of capacity?
• How many non-active licences do you own?
• Is there scope for structural changes that may improve performance?

By gathering and analyzing this data, you will have important reference points as to where you could make improvements that lead to cost savings.

Right-sizing refers to finding an optimal resource size that can balance licencing costs and performance costs.

At times, as organizations move workloads to the cloud, they buy more capacity and licences than needed, but never really use the extra inventory. This unused extra capacity adds to the total costs without any immediate value.

For example, the analysis from earlier may reveal that the CPU usage in your current servers stays below 50 percent most days. This means you can do with a smaller server instance in the AWS cloud that costs less for the same level of performance.

By identifying redundant server capacity, you can downsize servers to a size that better fits your needs and cut down on extraneous costs.

Similarly, AWS offers Reserved Instances (RI) and Spot Instances (SI) that come with heavy discounts compared to on-demand servers. These instances can be used for workloads with foreseeable capacity requirements and non-critical workloads at up to 70 percent lower costs.

As you analyze consumption metrics and find cost reduction opportunities, you will need to make certain changes to your current architecture. For this, you will need a modernization plan to ensure that structural changes can be implemented.

The following table presents the basic premise of a modernization plan, which can help you streamline the process of realizing cost savings.

As IT teams plan cloud migration, they often find it challenging to provision cloud services at optimal costs due to the number of key factors involved.

CDW Licencing Evaluation and Discovery Service (LEADS) assessment is designed to assist IT teams in optimizing their licence costs across on-premises and cloud environments. The assessment takes the burden off IT administrators by offering key insights into costly workloads and strategies to bring down cloud TCO.

The LEADS assessment simplifies the TCO optimization process for your IT team by:

• Offering a data-based, objective assessment of your current licencing agreements and utilization.
• Developing a custom roadmap for cloud migration, reducing both migration and ongoing cloud costs.
• Conducting asset discovery, performance visibility and contract reviews to ensure a smooth transition.

• Technical Performance Assessment: Identify over-provisioned resources and outdated hardware that drive up licencing costs.
• Implementation: Optimize your cloud environment to lower consumption and licencing expenses.
• Legacy Licencing Savings: Reduce CPU configurations, leverage bring-your-own-licence (BYOL) options and optimize SQL Server usage.

CDW is an esteemed AWS partner that brings extensive experience and expertise to licencing assessments for optimizing your IT infrastructure. With hundreds of hours working with the AWS cloud platform, CDW’s team of cloud-certified professionals and over 80 solution architects across Canada are well-equipped to handle complex IT challenges.

With over 20 years of experience in the Canadian market, CDW has a proven track record of delivering tailored solutions that meet the unique needs of various industries. From helping you save on licencing costs to navigating AWS platform architecture, we’ll engage with you throughout your AWS cloud adoption journey.