MIGRATING AND MANAGING MICROSOFT WORKLOADS ON AWS WITH DATAPIPE DATAPIPE.COM

MIGRATING AND MANAGING MICROSOFT WORKLOADS ON AWS WITH DATAPIPE DATAPIPE.COM

INTRODUCTION About Microsoft on AWS Amazon Web Services helps you build, deploy, scale, and manage Microsoft applications quickly, easily, securely, and cost-effectively on the AWS cloud. For corporate IT applications, AWS gives you a cloud platform that helps run Microsoft applications like SharePoint, Dynamics, and Exchange in a more secure, easily managed, high performance approach. For business owners, AWS delivers a fully managed database service to run Microsoft SQL Server as well as an option to run Microsoft SQL Server on EC2 instances, which helps you build web, mobile, and custom business applications. For Microsoft developers, Amazon EC2 for Windows Server provides a flexible and agile development platform, deeply integrated with Visual Studio and.net to help accelerate development cycles. APN Premier Consulting Partners like Datapipe help you plan, implement, and manage your cloud migration and deployment to maximize your benefits including agility, security, and cost efficiency. 2

WHY RUN MICROSOFT WORKLOADS ON AWS? Migrating and operating Microsoft workloads on AWS combines the practical tools and applications that your organization already utilizes with the cost effective, high performance environment that AWS provides. Secure AWS provides physical data center security, separation of the network, isolation of server hardware, and isolation of storage as well as tools and options for data encryption and access control. AWS Direct Connect can also be used to establish a private virtual interface from your on-premises network directly to your Amazon VPC, which provides you with a private, high bandwidth network connection between your network and your VPC. Reliable AWS has built its highly reliable infrastructure over 43 availability zones across 16 geographic regions. AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) have SLAs committing to 99.95% uptime. High Performance AWS provides you with enterprise-grade computing on-demand with options for automating both complex and routine tasks. Features such as automated scaling, dedicated low latency networks, and monitoring tools make AWS an excellent choice for enterprises running demanding Microsoft workloads. Extensive With a robust third-party application marketplace and more than 90 AWS services available, you can operate Microsoft workloads on a platform with options to expand and improve at any time. 3

WHY RUN MICROSOFT WORKLOADS ON AWS? (cont.) Familiar You re repurposing the same tools as you were in your onpremises environment. Rather than learning entirely new systems, your organization can enjoy the practical familiarity of Microsoft workloads. AWS provides a.net SDK and AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio to help you quickly and easily build new applications. You can also use AWS Elastic Beanstalk for deploying and scaling applications and services. Flexible You can bring your own licenses for Microsoft applications that you already own. You can also purchase Microsoft software licenses such as Windows Server and SQL Server directly through AWS and pay for them as you go with no upfront costs or longterm investments. Cost-Effective One of the biggest benefits of the AWS Cloud is the ability to pay only for the resources you use, reducing costly over-provisioning. AWS also helps you save money on your existing Microsoft application investments with options to bring your own licenses (BYOL). 4

CHALLENGES OF MIGRATING MICROSOFT WORKLOADS DATAPIPE.COM MIGRATING AND MANAGING MICROSOFT WORKLOADS ON AWS WITH DATAPIPE AWS Expertise As you consider migrating your Microsoft workloads to the cloud, your organization, like many, may lack inhouse AWS expertise. Migrating to the cloud is as much about optimizing endstate performance as it is about moving workloads. You ll want a team of experts on AWS migrations with you throughout the process to help you architect for optimal performance, and minimize the time and risks in the migration process. Meeting Compliance For many industries, including finance, retail, and healthcare, adhering to regulatory compliance standards is a top concern when migrating to a new cloud environment. Thankfully, AWS and APN Partners such as Datapipe can provide you with the information and tools to meet and maintain compliance standards for your industry. AWS has achieved a number of internationally recognized certifications and accreditations. Controlling Costs You likely want to move your organization away from spending its IT budget on provisioning and maintaining physical servers. The AWS Cloud presents the opportunity to do away with capital expenditure and instead optimize your budget on operating expenditure. Additionally, by migrating to the cloud, you no longer have to over-provision resources to accommodate peaks in demand. AWS provides pricing models where you only pay for the resources you use and you can automatically scale back resources when they are not needed. 5

MIGRATING AND OPERATING MICROSOFT WORKLOADS ON THE CLOUD DATAPIPE.COM MIGRATING AND MANAGING MICROSOFT WORKLOADS ON AWS WITH DATAPIPE Controlling Costs Migration isn t a one-size-fits-all solution, which is why Datapipe takes a customized approach for every organization. You may want to start small with your migration and expand your cloud environment over time. On the other hand, you may be interested in migrating your organization fully to AWS and modernizing Microsoft workloads along the way. Datapipe is your guide to seamlessly migrate Microsoft workloads from on-premises to the AWS Cloud. It s important to begin any migration by analyzing your current infrastructure and how it serves your organization. Identifying requirements, shortcomings, and business goals is key to creating a comprehensive strategy that mitigates risk and streamlines the migration and modernization of your Microsoft workloads. Six Common Migration Strategies ( The 6 R s ) During the planning stage of your migration, it s important to look determine what migration strategy is right for each workload. 1. 2. 3. Re-host Migrate workloads to the cloud as-is, also known as lift and shift. Re-platform Make a few cloud optimizations to a workload, also known as lift, tinker and shift. Repurchase Replace your current environment, casually referred to as drop and shop. 4. Re-factor/Re-architect Change the way the application is architected and developed, usually done by employing cloud-native features. 5. 6. Retire Decommission or archive unneeded portions of your IT portfolio. Retain Retain a portion of your portfolio to continue running on-premises, possibly migrating it to AWS in the future. 6

MIGRATING AND OPERATING MICROSOFT WORKLOADS ON THE CLOUD (cont.) Datapipe takes a three-pronged approach with migrating and managing Microsoft workloads: Plan Datapipe s approach is founded on the promise of putting planning before action. Our proven experience has given us unique insight into the best ways to uncover every infrastructure requirement. To reach a comprehensive conclusion, our experts will: Review ongoing technical deployments Identify existing pain points Conduct a situational analysis of current system Evaluate infrastructure for automation Assess configuration usage Recommend details on application deployment management Build Datapipe will help you build a modern, responsive architecture on AWS that suits your business objectives and budget, designed to handle your workload now and in the future. Datapipe leverages AWS experience and expertise to efficiently manage service account creation, help with importing data, and assist during the migration. One of the benefits of operating on AWS is your ability to customize your environment. Features such as usage predictions, scalability, and monitoring are all customizable on AWS. Datapipe can help you every step of the way. Run With certified Microsoft and AWS technicians on staff, you get a team of cloud experts on your side to manage your Microsoft workloads and cloud environment. Datapipe works directly with you to determine your escalation action plan and decommissioning of legacy environments. 7

CUSTOMER USE CASE: FTI CONSULTING FTI Consulting is an independent global business advisory firm dedicated to helping organizations manage change, mitigate risk, and resolve disputes: financial, legal, operational, political & regulatory, reputational and transactional. Individually, each practice is a leader in its particular field, staffed with experts recognized for the depth of their knowledge and a track record of making an impact. Collectively, FTI Consulting offers a comprehensive suite of services designed to assist clients across the business cycle from proactive risk management to the ability to respond rapidly to unexpected events and dynamic environments. The Challenge Since FTI Consulting handles massive amounts of sensitive data for their clients, security has always been an utmost concern. As the modern security landscape for businesses is constantly changing and growing in complexity, it was becoming more difficult to stay ahead of the curve and serve their clients best, especially in event-driven situations. The time and cost related to these updates resulted in FTI Consulting researching an alternative solution. 8

CUSTOMER USE CASE: FTI CONSULTING (cont.) Solutions FTI Consulting quickly decided the best move was migrating its workloads to the AWS Cloud. AWS was the cloud provider that offered the breadth of services that FTI Consulting was looking for. Additionally, AWS provided the enhanced agility FTI Consulting wanted to incorporate into its operations. With that in mind, FTI Consulting wanted to streamline its movement to the cloud but wanted a partner with AWS proficiency to perform the migration in-house. FTI Consulting was looking for a single managed service provider (MSP) to manage everything from the initial planning stage through post-migration monitoring and management. It ultimately decided on Datapipe because of the MSP s extensive AWS expertise and global footprint, matching FTI Consulting s global reach. Datapipe migrated and modernized FTI Consulting s SQL Server workloads, starting with the data that was not actively needed at the time, to limit downtime and make the migration as seamless as possible. The data was migrated to Amazon S3 buckets and then moved as necessary within the cloud. FTI Consulting s SQL Server databases are now hosted across several AWS Regions, including Virginia, U.S.; Ireland; and Sao Paulo, Brazil, which helps keep its environments secure, compliant, and highly available at all times. In addition to helping them meet compliance requirements, this also reduces latency for its employees and global customer base. 9

CUSTOMER USE CASE: FTI CONSULTING (cont.) Results and Benefits As part of its migration, FTI Consulting was able to consolidate 10 SQL Server instances from its legacy environment to just one cluster on AWS. Datapipe has helped FTI Consulting dramatically reduce the time it takes to provision new resources. This has helped the company align more with the on-demand nature of its clients. By leveraging the AWS Global Infrastructure, FTI Consulting can more easily meet data sovereignty-related compliance requirements and gives its employees and customers low-latency access to critical applications from almost anywhere. FTI Consulting has also been able to implement more robust security measures that can scale as its environment evolves. It can now archive old cases, which it wasn t able to do proactively on-premises, thus helping improve organization and efficiency and achieve data governance in the EU. FTI Consulting is well prepared to assist clients meet EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance requirements. FTI Consulting s goal is to be HITRUST certified and 100% on the cloud soon, and they re looking at Datapipe to help. 10

LEARN MORE About Datapipe A next generation MSP, Datapipe is recognized as the pioneer of managed services for public cloud platforms. Datapipe has unique expertise in architecting, migrating, managing, and securing public cloud, private cloud, hybrid IT, and traditional IT around the globe. The world s most trusted brands partner with Datapipe to optimize mission-critical and day-to-day enterprise IT operations, enabling them to transform, innovate, and scale. Backed by a global team of experienced professionals and world class interconnected data centers, Datapipe provides comprehensive cloud, compliance, security, governance, automation, and DevOps solutions. Datapipe is proud to be one of the first APN partners to achieve the AWS Microsoft Workloads competency for both Productivity Solutions and Database Solutions. Datapipe is an APN Premier Consulting Partner with the Exchange, Migration, Oracle, and SharePoint Competencies. To learn more about Datapipe, visit https://www.datapipe.com About Amazon Web Services For 10 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers more than 90 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, analytics, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and enterprise applications from 42 Availability Zones (AZs) across 16 geographic regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world monthly including the fastest growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com 11