When Is AWS’ Migration Acceleration Program Right for Your Business?

The cloud is essential for businesses to stay competitive. It offers unmatched access, flexibility and growth potential. In today's landscape, efficiency and resilience are more than just advantages‌ — ‌they're vital.

The pandemic was a catalyst for change. According to AWS data, 64% of leaders adopted at least one new cloud tool, while 40% tried the cloud for their business infrastructure for the first time. However, simply moving to the cloud isn't the golden ticket. In fact, 46% fell behind competitors who adopted cloud solutions more swiftly.

Businesses aiming for the top must reevaluate their strategy. Start by identifying your objectives and understanding how the cloud can address them through greater scalability or reduced costs. These goals will shape your cloud migration approach, influencing whether to refactor, lift-and-shift, or rebuild apps.

Migration transforms more than just tech—it reshapes entire operations. Knowing your current infrastructure and anticipating the migration's broader effects is crucial. Challenges like data security, managing legacy applications and maintaining performance can add layers of complexity.

While migrations can be long and taxing, spanning months or even years, they don't have to drain resources. The AWS Migration Acceleration Program offers tools to simplify and accelerate the process.

Understand the Migration Acceleration Program

The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) turbocharges your journey to the cloud. Drawing from vast experience with numerous enterprise migrations, AWS crafted a robust process that slashes costs and amps up agility, productivity and resilience. MAP's edge? Everything you need, bundled in one. It even brings in AWS Partner Network experts such as Mission Cloud.

Here's how MAP drives your business:

• Assess: Ready for the cloud? The migration readiness assessment checks your cloud compatibility across six AWS Cloud Adoption Framework dimensions‌ — ‌business, process, people, platform, operations and security. It's a deep dive into your business. Let's say you're a startup about to launch. This phase evaluates which tech bits to shoot up into the cloud and which to keep grounded.
• Mobilize: Found gaps in the “Assess” phase? Plug them in here. Create a migration roadmap and fine-tune your business strategy. Dive deep into app interdependencies and migration game plans. AWS suggests using their seven migration strategies, including relocate, rehost and refactor. Picture this: A firm detects scalability hitches. They see their old enterprise resource planning system's potential but sense it's not cloud-optimized. They choose refactoring — modernizing without losing its essence.
• Migrate and modernize: Every app gets a makeover‌ — ‌designed, shifted and tested. With MAP, you get a VIP pass to AWS' top-tier pros and partners such as Mission Cloud. Benefit from unmatched AWS wisdom to ensure your migration is smooth and sharp.

AWS MAP Success Stories

With MAP, you're not just migrating; you're optimizing. Trust AWS-certified pros to fortify your cloud foundations, boost migration speed, mitigate risks and transition financially feasible. Let’s take a look at three fictional scenarios where MAP can help businesses solve their challenges:

1. Ecotoys - An Eco-Friendly Startup:

• • Challenge: With booming popularity, this e-commerce startup grappled with on-premise server scalability issues, especially during high-demand seasons. Rising maintenance costs and an overwhelmed IT team added to the strain.
  • MAP's solution: Tailored technically and financially for startups, MAP can pair Ecotoys with AWS experts. The result? Enhanced platform performance, scalable infrastructure, reduced costs and a renewed focus on user experience and innovation.

2. UpCloth - A Textile Titan:

• • Challenge: As an industry mainstay, UpCloth faced the financial weight of an inflexible on-premise IT setup. Demand surges strained the company’s budget, stunting R&D and competitiveness.
  • MAP's solution: Through MAP, UpCloth can transition to a flexible cloud model, paying only for what's used. This shift means adaptive computing power and nixing the financially-draining overprovisioning cycle.

3. HealthNow - A Healthcare Innovator:

• • Challenge: With scattered patient data and applications, HealthNow sought IT consolidation. The company’s aim? A secure cloud environment. But the lack of expertise and resources posed risks, especially with patient data privacy at stake.
  • MAP's solution: MAP bridges the expertise gap. With AWS specialists proficient in compliance and data security, HealthNow can migrate securely, leveraging AWS's robust healthcare-focused compliance measures.

With MAP, you don’t have to be a migration expert to maximize your ROI. Instead, you can leverage AWS-certified expertise to help you build strong cloud foundations, accelerate and reduce risk, and offset the initial cost of your migrations. AWS recognizes organizations that offer proven technical knowledge and demonstrated customer experience as part of the AWS Partner Network. The most experienced partners and leaders in their markets, including Mission Cloud, are Premier Tier Services Partners, which have deeper expertise across a broader range of programs and a larger number of customers.

Examity Turbocharges AWS Migration Strategy With Mission Cloud

When Examity, a top-tier test proctoring service, faced the challenge of rapidly scaling its Microsoft Azure cloud during the pandemic, the stakes were high. Their infrastructure was stretched thin as remote testing demands surged, with test sessions spiking by an astounding 500%.

Examity CTO Paiman Nodoushani explained the challenge: “Our infrastructure compute resources were pushed to their limit, so we needed to improve our horizontal and vertical scalability to automatically access more and bigger server instances.” Nodoushani also wanted to strengthen the environment’s security posture, ensure high availability and speed up the DevOps lifecycle, which could take days to set up development environments and roll out platform enhancements.

Examity consulted with its private equity partner for guidance, which recommended Mission Cloud to develop a migration strategy. “From a hiring standpoint, it would have been difficult or even impossible to find the expertise we needed, and the cost for those four or five resources would have been exorbitant,” Nodoushani said.

With Mission Cloud support, AWS covered 50% of the project costs through MAP. Misson Cloud designed an infrastructure for the Examity platform using a variety of key AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Taking an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approach allowed Examity to quickly roll out new environments. Meanwhile, containers, which cache service and customer data into S3 buckets, sped up the DevOps process.

The IaC environment also helped Examity’s DevOps team quickly spin up development, test, staging and production servers. Now, they can roll out new application updates in just a few minutes, and customers are seeing faster response times too.

“With Mission doing such a good job in setting up the AWS environment, the migration cutover took us just six hours to complete—without any hitches,” Nodoushani said. “Afterwards, none of our customers experienced performance issues with our platform.”

Collaborate With a Premier Tier Services Partner

Partnering with a Premier Tier Services Partner connects you with seasoned AWS experts, streamlining your cloud journey. They assist in pinpointing AWS services, optimizing costs and crafting migration strategy.

Such partners carry a legacy of cloud migration success. Consider Techstreet. When acquired, they needed a swift AWS environment shift within six months. Enter Mission Cloud. Our intervention slashed ‌setup time from 60 hours to six and reduced migration costs by 70%. Now, Techstreet smoothly adjusts server instances and storage, experiences zero downtime and enjoys more benefits.

Why Mission Cloud? We offer bespoke cloud solutions. Our AWS-certified team blends vast migration know-how with a commitment to your specific needs, budget and timeline. From demystifying the cloud to refining and launching applications, we've got your back. Plus, we equip you with tools to monitor your cloud setup for sustained efficiency and performance.

Ready to amplify your cloud migration with Mission Cloud? Reach out to a cloud advisor and chart your cloud path forward.