Migrating to Cloud? Here’s How AWS and CDW Can Help You Succeed

The cloud migration journey represents the transition from on-premises IT assets to cloud-based services in a well-defined plan of action. It consists of the following phases.

The starting point for the cloud migration journey can look different for each organization. Some may already have deployments in the cloud and want to progress to modernization while others explore plans for successful adoption.  

For an organization ready to shift one of their workloads to the cloud, the first challenge would be to understand how a cloud environment operates. Each physical IT asset such as databases, servers or storage disks becomes a ‘service’ in the cloud.

The cloud environment is a configuration of services that work in tandem to run the workload. Now, the services must be orchestrated in a way that you can achieve your goals in an efficient, secure and performant manner.

If you’re not familiar with cloud services, you may have to navigate several unknowns in the process. All of which may prevent you from obtaining the cloud benefits you signed up for.

AWS Quick Starts reduce this complexity by offering a template-based approach. Instead of designing the cloud environment from scratch, which can be confusing, you can pick a template with the major groundwork already laid for you.

These templates are designed by AWS architects, which ensures that they meet migration best practices and are fully customizable to address your specific needs. Additional requirements, such as disaster recovery or load balancing, can be baked into the template.

This minimizes the complications that may arise during the setup phase so you can be sure you’re playing by the rules right from the start.

Most digital transformation initiatives come with budgetary and time constraints, as mapped in the cloud strategy. If an organization takes too long to migrate to the cloud, it may not be able to realize the intended benefits and may also lose out on time-sensitive market opportunities.

This usually happens when organizations without much prior cloud experience approach migrations in a highly manual way. Deploying each cloud service by hand not only takes more time but also heightens the chance of errors that can push migration timelines. The challenge is even more pronounced for bigger workloads that require extensive evaluation and testing.

To avoid this, AWS Quick Start offers a faster deployment method using AWS CloudFormation. Cloud architects can use the same templates to automate the deployment of several services at once rather than manually configuring each service by hand.

The CloudFormation console offers them an interface to manage and edit templates based on a JSON format. In many cases, the entire cloud infrastructure can be deployed within a single template, saving countless hours in the process.  

Security in the cloud begins right at the design phase. When organizations plan to move their workloads to the cloud, they must also implement security controls as part of the migration process.

Too often, security is handled after the migration is completed. This can create gaps in security policies as on-premises security controls may not hold up in the cloud environment.

Each cloud platform uses a unique methodology to define security in the cloud. If your existing system used a network firewall on-premises, it may need a complete overhaul as it shifts to the cloud. And if it’s fixed after being migrated, there is the risk of leaving unchecked vulnerabilities behind.

The AWS CloudFormation templates can address these vulnerabilities upfront by configuring security permissions, roles and access controls. Whenever you deploy a service with the help of CloudFormation, you can define who can access it, what network group it belongs to and so on.

This reduces the possibility of security gaps left behind at the time of migration. At the same time, organizations can meet industry compliance standards such as PIPEDA or PCI-DSS with compliant templates made specifically for this purpose.

There are scenarios where cloud migrations succeed without errors but the workloads turn out to be too costly or don’t perform as well as expected.

This happens when scalability and performance were not accounted for or were misjudged during the setup phase. For new cloud adopters that didn’t have previous data to support their migration estimates, this misalignment is quite common.

In such cases, organizations may overprovision cloud resources, which can spike costs, or may not provision enough capacity to meet the utilization bottom line.

AWS Quick Starts make it easy to build architectures that are performant and offer scalability. For example, cloud-native features such as multizone availability and autoscaling groups can be part of the template without extensive efforts.

Customer workloads deployed with these features can handle scenarios like a sudden increase in demand or overprovisioning without incurring extra costs. As a result, performance stays consistent while the initial cost estimates don’t go overboard.

The figure above shows how cloud services without autoscaling (dynamic scaling) are unable to meet a sudden shift in utilization (demand). Whereas, with autoscaling, the demand is automatically balanced by adjusting capacity in real time.

AWS Quick Starts solve many migration challenges for organizations seeking to leverage cloud for their business. But without in-house talent and expertise around cloud systems, even the templates could be hard to use.

Moreover, cloud migration is not a one-time event. It needs constant support and monitoring until the cloud adoption plans bear fruit. Not all organizations may have the budget or capacity to hire additional talent for this purpose.

This is where they can access AWS partners for helping them with their cloud migration needs. Partners like CDW can utilize AWS Quick Starts to deliver high-quality results with the same agility and accuracy, without having to bear long-term cloud costs.

CDW Canada is an esteemed AWS partner with certified AWS cloud practitioners that enable customers to confidently migrate to the cloud. We can take your organization from on-premises to cloud-based with our targeted migration support services as part of our AWS Cloud Migration QuickStart offering.

We can remove the uncertainty and help you access AWS cloud, including:

• Deployment of migration tooling using Application Migration service in your organization’s environment
• Configuration of servers for replication
• Cutover assistance
• Staging test and troubleshooting
• Cutover of host to cloud
• Guidance and knowledge transfer from our cloud experts

Our 20 years of experience in the Canadian market and a team of over 80 cloud solution architects across Canada can help bring predictability to your cloud strategy. We follow the assess, architect, implement and operate model, which helps you take care of your migration needs, no matter where you are in your transformation journey.