As companies chart a course from on-premises IT to a modern cloud infrastructure, they come face to face with complexity at nearly every turn. With CleanSlate Technology Group as their guide, companies can take a simplified and direct route from migration to modernization, creating an IT foundation primed for innovation, insulated from on-premises complexity, and protected from rising VMware costs.
Accelerating VMware migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS) is crucial for maintaining competitive advantage. The scalability and flexibility of the AWS cloud address the high costs and inflexibility of maintaining aging VMware systems and databases, enabling businesses to easily scale resources on demand while ensuring optimized performance and operational efficiency. A modern cloud offers significant cost savings, by eliminating high licensing fees and reducing reliance on on-premises hardware. Compared to legacy infrastructure, cloud reduces maintenance overhead, enhances disaster recovery capabilities, improves security, and maximizes automation to reduce reliance on senior experts for time-consuming administrative tasks.
The Amazon Elastic Virtual Server (EVS) service delivers further enhancements, by providing scalable, high-performance compute instances that support a wide range of workloads, making it easier to migrate and run VMware-based applications in the cloud. Modernizing legacy applications on AWS with microservices, AWS-native services, software as a service (SaaS), and other advanced patterns empowers organizations to drive innovation, enhance scalability, reduce costs, and open up new revenue potential.
AWS delivers a host of benefits, but companies are struggling to modernize in the cloud. Depth of bench and, specifically, limited expertise in areas such as DevOps and zero trust are ongoing hurdles. Companies also lack a clear understanding of the costs and value of AWS modernization and are fearful of migrating existing problems and limitations to a new platform.
“Clients are stuck in old ways of thinking or are dealing with so much technical debt that they become blinded to the potential to innovate, deliver faster, and get to market quicker with a modern platform,” says Brad Laughlin, VP, Strategy and Operations, at CleanSlate.
CleanSlate: The right modernization partner
With CleanSlate’s four-step process, companies can easily transform legacy applications into SaaS or modern applications, complete with microservices, AWS-native services, and advanced patterns, enabling organizations to innovate faster and reduce infrastructure complexity.
Step 1: Establish a directional business case and optimization and licensing assessment (OLA).This phase takes stock of existing VMware infrastructure and determines what should be migrated or optimized — or remain as is. Key business drivers and measurable criteria are defined to ensure buy-in and establish a well-defined road map for success. The OLA evaluation provides insights into which workloads should be rightsized, consolidated, or decommissioned.
Step 2: Perform a migration acceleration assessment. As part of this stage, CleanSlate performs a 7R analysis to determine how workloads will best perform in AWS to meet core objectives. The assessment considers migration readiness and explores dependencies, resource utilization, and application compatibility to avoid potential performance bottlenecks or service disruptions during the transition.
Step 3: Execute mobilization for migration. Organizations can take advantage of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) to get access to financial incentives, expert guidance, and best practices to simplify migration and modernization. CleanSlate leverages an array of AWS and third-party cloud analysis and migration tools, including Cast Software and CloudHedge, to accelerate modernization.
Step 4: Perform migrations and modernizations. CleanSlate leverages AWS-native tools to simplify infrastructure management, enhance performance, and provide robust security. CleanSlate’s efforts to help companies modernize by moving from legacy applications to SaaS solutions — coupled with CleanSlate services covering DevOps, data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and generative AI — empower the companies to innovate and drive revenue growth.
There is no shortage of twists and turns as enterprises transition from on-premises to the AWS cloud. CleanSlate offers a clear road map for success, whether the path is VMware-to-AWS migration or complete modernization of the IT estate.