Today, it would be hard to find an enterprise leader who would debate the necessity of cloud. A decade and half since AWS’ arrival, the world is running on cloud computing platforms to deliver top-notch digital experiences across every corner of the globe. The revolution hasn’t been easy and so hasn’t the transformation journey of the millions of businesses that have jumped from their legacy datacenters to the cloud’s secure, flexible, and agile operations base.
However, even today, businesses end up adopting inaccurate cloud migration strategies such as on AWS that severely limit their growth and returns. Instead of simple lift and shift to AWS, firms should embrace a migration plus modernization plan; optimize workloads and applications to best leverage AWS’ ecosystem and its native services. This blog specifically highlights some of the best AWS migration tools to achieve the same fool-proof and monitor the migrated landscape for continually optimum returns.
But, before we dive in further, let us explore the benefits of moving to AWS cloud apart from the obvious trust factor from it being one of the top two cloud providers in the world today.
What are the benefits of migrating to AWS cloud?
- Spin up or spin down high-performance infrastructure on choice and demand
- Auto-scalable features ensuring automated scale up and scale down of resources based on web traffic and needs
- Highly available infrastructure including all applications, workloads, platforms running on top of it
- Industry-leading programs, methodologies, frameworks to best migrate on AWS cloud without friction and run at continued gains
- Dedicated budget optimization plans to gain the best performance out of your cloud at minimal expenses
- 200+ AWS-native tools and services to help the business grow and transform on cloud
- Single stop user dashboard for managing entire IT operations on cloud without a hitch, dedicated support services as needed
- High interoperability and flexibility; move any database, apps from third-party or on-prem facilities to AWS, integrate multiple landscapes to create a seamless hybrid architecture
- Accelerated time to market with agile operations powered by DevOps tools, automation, etc
- Leading analytics, AI, ML tools to help make data intelligent business decisions
- World-class security and pre-met compliance, governance solutions
- Large pool of managed service partners to help manage the cloud landscape end-to-end without any stress on internal teams
- AWS-native DR tools and services to ensure uninterrupted continuity of operations on AWS cloud
Now, well established the advantages of migrating to AWS cloud, here’re the top tools to help achieve the same at zero loss and nil disruption to business as usual.
The Top 5 Tools for AWS Migration: Kickstart Cloud Evolution at Zero Data Loss
1. AWS Migration Hub: Acting as the one-stop-shop for your AWS migration journeys, AWS Migration Hub lies under the AWS Management Console. It helps firms track their entire migration activities including server and infrastructure, applications, platforms, workloads, etc. The solution provides users with the necessary discovery, planning, tracking, and data overview of all key assets migrated to AWS or in migration. AWS Discovery tools, AWS Migration tools, and AWS Migration programs are some services integrated within the AWS Migration Hub.
2. AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART): One of the most popular AWS tools for businesses to plan their migration on AWS cloud, this solution helps users with a comprehensive guided checklist to assess whether its existing assets and resources are ready to be transitioned to the cloud or not. This could mean all workloads, processes, and workflows associated with the resources, the version requirements, compliance issues, and more. In essence, this acts as a one stop guide to check the readiness of an organization’s ITOps to be transitioned and operated on the cloud. Without the necessary maturity, the transition might realize into out of sync processes, frequent failures due to version inaccuracies, security loopholes, limited cloud governance, and more.
3. AWS Migration Evaluator: Modern migration journeys are not just about moving to a high performance, new hosting infrastructure but also about the entire business operations can be made more agile for the new market and its ever-demanding consumers. With AWS Migration Evaluator, firms can continuously assess their cloud footprint including all infra, apps, workloads, platforms running on AWS to visualize whether the assets are performing up to level or not. AWS Migration Evaluator delivers reports including smart analytics and intelligence on the running state of the cloud assets and helps leaders make informed business decisions such as spinning up and down servers based on need, adopting new services based on size and agility, and monitoring health of resources for maximum impact. It can also project or predict migration costs, allowing businesses to transform on AWS at best ROI.
4. AWS Application Discovery Services: While the AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool helps businesses to realize the overall cloud maturity of their IT assets, the AWS Application Discovery Services solution helps firms realize the exact stack of IT assets that need to be moved to AWS at the first place. The tool integrates with the concerned organization’s on-prem datacenter environments, infrastructure, applications, databases, workloads and delivers users with comprehensive intel on their computer requirements, performances, configurations, etc. The data then can be fed to AWS Cost Calculators or TCO calculators to understand the actual expenses of moving them all on AWS cloud. Hence, IT leaders can make conscious decisioning on the right mix of stack, applications, and workloads to be moved to AWS for the best impact.
5. AWS Database Migration Service: Databases are basically the core fuel of enterprises to run their daily operations and hence any disruption or outage in the same could be perilous. That’s where AWS Database Migration Service comes in as it promises seamless movement of any database to cloud without any downtime whatsoever. With this solution, a business can move any or all its databases built on the most widely used platforms and open-source environments to AWS in a fully automated manner. During the migration, the source database remains functional and any updates made to the same are automatically replicated on the cloud database. This ensures that data functions in an organization never go down. In addition to its fully automated nature, the solution is also self healing implying that any disrupt (network outage, etc) during the process would ensure that no data is lost, and the migration is resumed fool-proof once the outage is over.
AWS Migration with Cloud4C: Your Fully Managed Services Partner
Even though migration to AWS cloud can be kickstarted with in-house skills, over time it might become strenuous if implemented alone. In such scenarios, dedicated managed services partners come in handy who take over the entire legwork associated with transition to cloud while the internal team focuses duly on customer experience, innovation, and end business outcomes. Cloud4C, the world’s leading application-focused Cloud MSP, is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with over 7 AWS Competencies. Having successfully addressed cloud transformation needs for 4000+ enterprises across the globe, Cloud4C specializes in industry-leading, automation-empowered IT evolutions on AWS cloud.
Cloud4C initiates any AWS migration exercise with a Well Architected Review of the client’s existing landscape that assesses the latter’s migration objectives, business goals, and most importantly cloud maturity. Post assessment, a dedicated team of experts draft a fail-proof migration blueprint with key performance indicators and responsibility matrices. Now, the implementation is done following the industry-leading Cloud Adoption Framework and the Automated AWS Migration Factory Approach that completes the migration at unprecedented agility while ensuring next to nil disruption to business as usual. Cloud4C’s AWS Center of Excellence takes over to support and manage the landscape end-to-end for continually high-performance outcomes and returns for the client.
You can learn more on our AWS migration services here.
