On-premises to AWS cloud migration: From planning to deployment

Cloud migration is one of the key initiatives for businesses looking to modernize and stay competitive. Moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS), in particular, opens a new realm of opportunities for enterprises, including using AWS Cloud Operations to gain a 241% return on investment (ROI) over a three-year period. When handled expertly, cloud adoption also enables accelerated workload deployment and greater flexibility. So, what other worthwhile benefits does AWS migration offer? What are the steps to conduct on-premises to AWS cloud migration? In this guide, we’ll take you through the main phases of the migration process and discover real-life examples of AWS cloud adoption outcomes.

Why is AWS a solid choice among cloud providers?

AWS is the current market leader among cloud providers. For enterprises migrating from on-premises architectures, it enables an incredible 94% decrease in downtime while reducing operating expenses by half. Businesses also report a 62% increase in their IT personnel’s productivity as a result of AWS adoption. So, how is AWS holding its position at the forefront of cloud transformation? Here are several key reasons:

1. Advanced cost-effectiveness

Although all cloud providers offer pay-as-you-go pricing, AWS features a number of special options that might make it the most cost-effective choice. It helps you eliminate upfront costs with an extensive free tier, and you can further optimize your budget with models like Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, and Spot Instances. For enterprises planning migration from on-premises to cloud AWS, these options provide substantial discounts and significantly reduce operating expenses. Besides, AWS offers a variety of efficient cost management tools like Cost Explorer and Budgets to help you monitor your spending.

2. A broad offering of security features

AWS offers robust security features to protect your workloads. Tools like AWS Shield, Amazon GuardDuty, CloudWatch, and CloudTrail enable real-time activity monitoring, threat detection, and detailed user logging. Additionally, AWS includes identity and access management (IAM) components that allow you to configure precise access controls for different user groups.

3. Quick access to the latest innovations

Always striving to be a step ahead, AWS drives innovation with a suite of cutting-edge services. For instance, tools like Amazon SageMaster simplify the deployment of Machine Learning solutions, while AWS Lambda enables serverless computing. These innovations promote agile development and empower businesses to scale effortlessly.

Migrating to AWS offers transformative benefits, but the process isn’t without its challenges. When the cloud is implemented incorrectly, missteps can result in security gaps, underused resources, and hidden costs. To avoid these pitfalls, consider partnering with an experienced AWS cloud consultant. They will ensure a smooth, secure migration precisely tailored to your needs, enabling you to not only dodge potential risks but also maximize the value of your cloud investment.

On-premises to AWS cloud migration: Key stages and steps

At N-iX, we perform migration to AWS in four stages. While each migration project is tailored to our clients’ unique needs, we follow industry standards and AWS best practices, enhanced by our years of hands-on experience. Let’s review the essential migration phases and steps we’ve honed over time.

Discovery and initial assessment

This first stage is designed to give you clarity and confidence by allowing our engineers to understand your setup, align on your objectives, and provide a customized roadmap to ensure a smooth transition. Here are the main steps we take during this time:

1. Identifying your business objectives

Why do you want to transfer your digital estate to the cloud? Answering this question before drafting any migration plans is immensely useful. Although it may be difficult to set precise key performance indicators (KPIs) at the initial stages, understanding your general goals allows us to fit the process to your requirements. And if you’ve just started exploring the cloud, we can conduct a Product Discovery to pinpoint the most promising opportunities.

2. Conducting an initial cloud readiness assessment

To start planning the migration process, we first need to understand where you currently are in your cloud journey. A readiness assessment evaluates how well-suited your organization’s current state is for cloud adoption. Also, before migrating any workloads, we take stock of your assets—applications, networks, services, and databases—evaluating which of them are migration-ready. While some components can be transferred as-is, legacy application migration may require re-architecture.

3. Estimating total cost of ownership

After analyzing your on-premises infrastructure, our team prepares a total cost of ownership (TCO) report. We also conduct cost modeling to estimate the long-term budgeting requirements of your new cloud environment.

4. Performing gap analysis and creating a mitigation plan

A gap analysis highlights potential obstacles during on-premises to cloud migration, focusing on infrastructure, operations, and skills. We conduct it early in the process to pinpoint areas that require improvement. Afterward, we create a mitigation plan to address the uncovered challenges and ensure a smooth transition.

AWS architecture design and pilot migration

Once we’re aligned on the strategy for your migration from on-premises to cloud AWS, it’s time to lay down the foundation of your new cloud architecture—a landing zone. During this phase, our team sets up and configures your AWS accounts, runs application discovery, prepares a pilot workload, and conducts a pilot migration. The key steps of this comprehensive process include:

1. Conducting in-depth discovery and creating a migration plan

Performing on-premises to AWS cloud migration means prioritizing workloads to maximize transfer efficiency. At this point, we take time to thoroughly map dependencies to understand how your systems interact and which workloads are the most critical. Transferring smaller, less crucial solutions first helps us ensure cloud migration doesn’t disrupt your regular operations and results in minimal downtime. In addition to analyzing potential business impacts, we also prioritize workloads based on their complexity and cost of transfer.

After the analysis is completed, we create a detailed migration roadmap to guide the next steps.

2. Creating a landing zone for applications

A landing zone is the basis of your AWS environment, designed to support secure and scalable migration. Our team configures this environment to align with your architecture, ensuring it meets all the operational requirements. This includes setting up accounts, establishing networking, configuring security controls, and defining compliance standards. By preparing a tailored landing zone, we pave the way for seamless migration while maintaining a consistent governance framework.

Here are several core components we configure:

• Networks: Proper network setups ensure AWS migration from on-premises to the cloud doesn’t compromise connectivity. We design networks, focusing on optimizing data flow and enabling dynamic scaling to meet changing workload demands.
• Accounts: We implement a multi-account strategy to segment workloads across accounts for improved security and resource management. Each account is configured with role-based access and budget controls.
• Access controls: To ensure your applications and data maintain integrity, we set up robust identity and access management (IAM) protocols, fine-tuning user permissions.

3. Engaging relevant stakeholders

Migration success largely depends on alignment across multiple teams, including technical and business personnel. We collaborate with our client’s stakeholders to gather insights, address concerns, and ensure our migration plan accounts for their objectives. This step also includes preparing your staff for operational changes and providing additional training where necessary.

4. Proof of concept (PoC) and pilot migration

To test the waters and validate our migration approach, we carry out a pilot migration or proof of concept (PoC). This involves transferring a small workload to the AWS landing zone to test its performance and compatibility. A successful pilot migration proves the reliability of our strategy, while also helping uncover potential bottlenecks and optimize processes before full-scale implementation.

Full-scale workloads migration

Once we validate our approach, the next milestone in our on-premises to AWS cloud migration plan is to transition the rest of your digital estate. We determine the most suitable migration model and plan the order for transitioning the remaining applications. Following AWS best practices, our engineers use the following cloud migration strategies, also known as the seven R’s model:

• Relocate: Move entire workloads to the cloud without changes;
• Rehost: Migrate applications without altering their existing architecture;
• Replatform: Move applications to the cloud while making changes to reduce costs and harness new cloud capabilities;
• Repurchase: Replace existing on-premises software with new SaaS or commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions;
• Refactor: Adapt applications to use cloud infrastructure while keeping the core elements, such as programming languages, containers, and frameworks;
• Retain: Keep specific workloads on-premises due to operational, strategic, or compliance needs;
• Retire: Decommission outdated systems that no longer present business value.

Depending on the size of your infrastructure, matching workloads to suitable migration strategies may require a precise and tailored approach. For complex architectures, the initial migration plan may cover a generalized migration methodology. Subsequently, we analyze each separate workload in detail and choose a specific migration strategy that best fits it.

Ongoing optimization and improvement

After migration, we continue AWS development and determine optimization mechanisms to enhance performance and reduce costs. Here are several key steps we take during this stage:

1. Ensuring continuous monitoring and optimization

To ensure your systems run smoothly and scale as needed while regularly evolving to meet your business needs, we focus on the following:

• Setting up monitoring tools: We configure monitoring tools like AWS CloudWatch and CloudTrail to keep track of system health, performance, and log activity.
• Achieving optimal performance and reliability: By implementing AWS Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), we ensure your infrastructure can effectively adjust to fluctuating traffic demands.
• Ensuring operational excellence: We introduce tools to help you continuously analyze your AWS resources to optimize performance while minimizing risks.
• Modernizing processes, technologies, and services: As part of ongoing optimization, we compare your setup against new AWS services and features, helping you stay competitive and make full use of emerging innovations.

2. Developing cost optimization strategies

Cloud migration is an investment, but it shouldn’t break the bank. After your application migration from on-premises to AWS cloud, we focus on developing cost optimization strategies to maximize efficiency. This includes adjusting resources to match demand and continuously monitoring usage to ensure your cloud infrastructure stays cost-effective.

Read more: Best practices for AWS cost reduction

3. Implementing security best practices

Cloud security is crucial at every stage of your migration journey. Our engineers implement identity management, encryption, continuous monitoring, and other data protection measures to keep your new cloud infrastructure secure and compliant. In addition to implementing AWS security best practices, we also perform application security testing to identify vulnerabilities before they enable data breaches.

Success story: Conducting on-premises to AWS migration to reinforce security for a large international bank

Our client is an established international bank, spreading over 260 branches and serving more than 2M customers worldwide. The scope of operations required them to collect massive amounts of data, and our client was using on-premises data centers to store the information. They sought to design and implement a cloud-based disaster recovery strategy to lower the risk of security breaches and data loss.

N-iX closely collaborated with the client to establish a secure AWS infrastructure. We built a production-ready landing zone, implemented infrastructure as code (IaC), and designed a robust network architecture tailored to meet strict regulatory requirements. By deploying VMware Cloud on AWS, we enabled the client to achieve seamless replication of virtual machines, ensuring smooth migration. In addition, we set up AWS S3 for disaster recovery and AWS Direct Connect Gateway for dedicated connections.

As a result of the AWS migration with N-iX, our client managed to fortify their business continuity and safeguard critical data. By replicating data from on-premises to AWS and creating secure backups, we enabled them to ensure seamless recovery even in worst-case scenarios.

Read the full case here: Disaster recovery in banking with AWS data migration

Why should you trust N-iX to conduct your on-premises to AWS cloud migration?

• N-iX is a certified AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with extensive expertise in migrating on-premises systems to AWS.
• Over the course of our 21 years of experience, we have successfully delivered more than 110 AWS projects for logistics, manufacturing, retail, and other businesses.
• Our team of 400 cloud experts includes over 90 AWS-certified specialists, proficient in cloud migration, DevOps, and cost optimization.
• N-iX complies with rigorous security regulations and standards, including GDPR, PCI DSS, ISO 27001:2013, and ISO/IEC 27701:2019, to ensure your data and resources stay safe.