Deciding on moving to the cloud is by no means an easy task or a decision. Relocating the organization’s IT infrastructure and application requires a carefully calculated plan delivered by highly skilled cloud professionals.
Before we dive deeper into the nitty-gritty details of migrating to cloud strategy, we must understand the WHY! Why is moving to the cloud going to be the right choice to make? For that, stakeholders must see the value of migrating their workloads to the cloud.
Why do you need this move?
The easiest and most sound way of showing the value of the cloud is by highlighting the following key areas:
- Cost Reduction: Moving to the cloud will be the right move if the organization reduces its IT infrastructure. Moving to the cloud will eliminate the need to procure, maintain, and end of life for IT hardware, which is the costliest part of the IT spend.
- Selecting the right tools to do the right job: Cloud migration is not just a lift & shift of IT resources from one data center to another. Instead, cloud services offer a wide range of services that can substitute legacy tools, leading to significant performance increases and cost decreases.
- The flexibility of cost: One of the best things about the cloud is its flexibility when it comes to consuming IT resources. Users will only pay for what they consume, which means that organizations will no longer be concerned about underutilizing their IT resources.
How can we help
Given all the benefits of moving to the cloud, organizations must devise a carefully calculated plan to realize all the advantages. Here at Bespin Global, we specialize in assisting organizations of different sizes and workload complexity in moving into the cloud.
This blog will shed light on helping organizations that run Microsoft workloads move to the AWS cloud and realize all the benefits of taking on such tasks. As the trusted partner of Amazon Web Services and a leading cloud system integrator in the Middle East, we offer a clear strategy for migrating our client’s Microsoft workload through the Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) for Windows workloads.
What is the AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA)?
AWS OLA is a free program for new and existing customers to assess and optimize current on-premises and cloud environments, based on actual resource utilization, third-party licensing, and application dependencies.
Facts about OLA
OLA shows you how to save on third-party licensing costs and run your resources more efficiently. The assessment will enable you to model your deployment options using your existing licensing entitlements and reduce costs at an average of 36% in the process. Third-party analysis of 300 OLA’s over 2021 shows that, on average, customers can save 77% on Windows Server licensing and 45% on SQL Core licensing cost (when migrated to Dedicated Hosts in AWS). It also showed that the first party licenses cost represents, on average, three times the compute, storage and networking cost on AWS. Therefore, licensing costs are a significant part of the total IT environment and need to be considered when costs are essential in migrating to the cloud.
What does the OLA consist of?
- Assess the workload through analyzing the current environment and type of workloads running
- Collect data in multiple ways, from installing a specific application that collects the data to performing manual workload analysis.
- Analyze the collected data and use it as the building block for the to-be desired state on the cloud
- Devise a tailored plan for the organization based on the data collected from their environment.
The Bespin Global promise
- As-is Analysis. We will look at the entire infrastructure where the aim is to understand the running workload, the underlying hardware, and software.
- Assessment and deliverables. We will take all the information collected as part of the as-is analysis and create multiple outputs.
- Insights on the current environment where we analyze the performance and the workload
- Inventory & licenses, in this part, we showcase a list of all the current inventory in terms of hardware and licensing.
- Annual cost estimate for as-is architecture (typically on-premises)
- Cost savings plan where we highlight the monetary savings for clients if they follow the provided recommendations.
Reap the Benefits of AWS OLA
- Rightsize your resources. Discover workloads in your on-premises or cloud environment and build an inventory of your compute resources. Our tooling-based approach will help you determine your actual utilization requirements to help optimally select the lowest-cost AWS EC2 instance size and type for each workload. Use this data to determine the right blend of on-demand and spot instances, dedicated hosts, savings plan, and other options tailored to your environment.
- Reduce costs. Without optimizing your cloud infrastructure, the cost of overprovisioning third-party licensing can exceed the cost of compute. Leverage the recommendations from an AWS OLA to get the most value from your existing licensing entitlements by configuring your instances to require fewer licenses while still maintaining highly performant applications. Adapt your on-premises licensing strategy to enable your cloud migration.
- Explore flexible licensing options. Use the results of an AWS OLA to avoid unnecessary licensing costs and vendor lock-in. Model different licensing scenarios with license-included or Bring Your Own License (BYOL) instances, to meet the needs of your business. Flexible licensing options enable you to drive seasonal workloads and support agile experimentation, as well as to model dedicated environments, so you only pay for what you need.
OLA with Bespin Global
- Financial assurances, our team will ensure that the client’s decision of migrating to the cloud is a financially sound step. We will deliver such promise through the data collected during the analysis phase and the reports available for our clients.
- Access to top-notch services with a proven track record. Our team consists of highly skilled individuals in cloud operations and, more specifically, specialized in AWS and Microsoft workloads.
- Frugality, over and over, we come across scenarios where customers sacrifice some of their licenses as part of their cloud migration plan. Our detailed analysis at Bespin ensures that we leverage all the possible client licenses in their transition journey to the cloud.
Let Bespin and AWS Right-size your Cloud Resources
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BESPIN GLOBAL "an e& enterprise company"
An AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and AWS Managed Service Partner, BESPIN GLOBAL MEA (Middle East and Africa) is a leading provider of automated cloud solutions and consulting services, including cloud adoption, strategy, migration, implementation, Managed Services, DevOps, FinOps and Data & Analytics. Bespin is positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, as well as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for IT Transformation Services.
In late 2022, Bespin Global MEA and e& enterprise formed a joint venture with the aim to assist enterprises in their digital transformation journey and eventually become the largest pure-play public cloud-managed and professional services provider in the Middle East, Turkey, Africa, and Pakistan.
Bespin’s cloud FinOps management platform, OpsNow offers an automated end-to-end solution for customers to effectively manage cloud assets and costs, optimize cloud expenses, and automate the implementation of cloud governance policies across multi-cloud environments.