Microsoft Workloads Migration to AWS for Better Scalability and Cost Optimization

Challenge

The energy & chemical industry is cyclical. The ability to respond quickly to new opportunities when demand is great and to scale down when it fades is paramount to the success of a business. The physical server infrastructure can hamper a company’s marketplace agility. Migrating from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud is therefore one of the key growth levers for any company. Automated processes help them stay true to timelines and can govern them in an efficient manner. With better technological processes — enabled by the cloud — they can be more responsive and remain relevant in a world of proliferating competition.

One of India’s leading energy and chemical companies too realized the need for a stable, secure, and flexible IT infrastructure that could be available round the clock. The company faced many challenges with its traditional on-premises data centers and was looking to implement intelligent automation solutions to handle high-volume requests, service level consistency, and optimization of workforce alignments.

Challenges the company faced with its on-premises data centers:

1. Inability to scale with demand — In a physically distributed environment, they were unable to respond quickly to new project demands. They had difficulty in accurately estimating the capacity needed for new projects and swiftly provisioning the correct number of servers. Without the ability to scale, their IT department would often oversubscribe extra capacity to avoid having too little.
2. New infrastructure deployment — The company’s inability to quickly deploy infrastructure when needed was one of the major challenges it faced. Quick turnaround time to deploy new data servers was critical for its future plans.
3. Budget control– The on-premises data centers were becoming too expensive and inefficient to support their global business operations. The company wanted to be able to scale with demand while keeping the costs down.
4. Security Concerns — There was a need for better security measures with less infrastructure complexity to handle data security breaches.
5. Fault Tolerance- Downtimes faced in the existing infrastructure of the company’s on-premises data centers took longer to recover. Identifying and analyzing the problem and then fixing it quickly was a crucial business objective.

This company needed to operate within a more flexible and transparent framework to move beyond these limitations. A transition from on-premises data centers to cloud-hosted applications seemed to be the most suitable solution due to the benefits of scalability, reliability, and cost management.

They found it worth engaging AWS cloud-managed services to handle the cloud infrastructure and fully support it for new deployments, security, and services automation.

They engaged the services of Applied Cloud Computing (ACC), an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner, to help migrate their Microsoft Workloads to the AWS cloud.

Solution

Microsoft Workloads migration to the cloud involved the preparation of an accurate plan by comprehending the current challenges the company faced. After analyzing various options for migration, we at ACC, decided to go for the “Lift and Shift”, as speed and cost were our main focus areas.

In Lift and Shift, otherwise known as Rehosting, we just pick up the applications and move them pretty much as it is onto AWS cloud.

Companies have found that even without any optimization, they could save up to 30% of their total cost just by rehosting. Also, it is easier to optimize applications later once they already live in the cloud. Because now your organization has better skills to do so. The hard part, the migration, is already complete.

Initially, AWS Server Migration Service was used to migrate the on-premises data servers onto the cloud. Once the company’s technical team was satisfied with the performance of the migrated data servers, they started assigning other migration projects of other business divisions.

We were able to migrate all mission-critical applications to AWS. This migration not only proved to our client that on-premises data centers can be seamlessly integrated into the AWS Cloud but also addressed every challenge they had with their existing infrastructure. They could now be able to respond swiftly to marketplace conditions, prototype and complete projects quickly, and focus on business growth instead of IT costs.

Benefits

• High Scalability — AWS Cloud has the capability to implement right sizing. Before initiating this project, our client had to forecast the IT resources to be provisioned and more often than not, the estimates would be on the higher side. With the cloud, their IT team no longer has to worry about resources and procurement. Our solution ensured that they got scalability and ease of infrastructure deployment to handle peak loads and sudden spurts. The procurement cycle time of 6–8 weeks was reduced down to minutes and hours. AWS Auto Scaling was used to ensure the underlying resources could be scaled effortlessly with demand and without the hassle of having to manage the hardware.

• Cost Optimization — Cost being an important metric was optimized as AWS Cloud allows you to pay as you go, pay only for the resources consumed and only for the time for which the resource is consumed. Cost was further optimized by using the consolidated billing feature in AWS Organizations to combine billing and payment for multiple AWS accounts. Our ongoing support to the client ensures that they are always on the right pricing plan, their storage costs are minimized as well as their resources are right-sized for maximum utilization. Additionally, one can save money by moving their Microsoft licenses to dedicated hosts on AWS. The licensing is included within the cost of an instance, so it not only reduces licensing cost but the management overhead of maintaining those licenses.
• Reliability — For quick data recovery from downtimes and enhanced security, it is possible to select multiple availability zones and host Microsoft Workloads across different connected AWS regions resulting in lower latency and higher fault tolerance. AWS also helps predict the moment when you need to scale up or down your infrastructure capacity without the risk of interruptions. Data Recovery drills can be planned and executed by the client to test business continuity.
• Better Security Measures — By storing Microsoft Workloads centrally, AWS offers much stronger security than traditional data centers. Critical resources are placed in private subnets with no access to the public Internet and Internet-facing applications are placed behind firewalls and encryptions, keeping your data secure. Security monitoring can be enabled through Amazon GuardDuty and application monitoring through Amazon CloudWatch. This also provides system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health.

With this successful migration, our client can now use cloud technology to find new ways to deliver innovative experiences to its customers. By selecting AWS as its preferred cloud service and ACC as its migration partner, they can now tap into the world’s broadest and deepest portfolio of cloud services to drive their digital transformation journey. This unlocks new possibilities to further transform its service offerings and engagement with customers.