Migration & Modernization

Unleashing the Power of the Cloud with the AWS Cloud Value Framework (CVF) – Summary (7/7)

Summary

Introduction

This blog forms part of a series on the AWS Cloud Value Framework (CVF). The CVF serves as a comprehensive guide to help businesses to evaluate, quantify, and communicate the value of AWS Cloud adoption. It comprises five pillars with this blog focused on summarizing the series.

Direct links to each of the blogs are available:

Summary of the CVF Blog Series

The CVF helps businesses understand and measure the true power of the cloud. Aligning with the pillars of cost savings, staff productivity, operational resilience, business agility and sustainability, organizations can quantify and measure the impact to their business.

Cost Savings

Invest time to understand your current spend for your on-premises data centers. This should include an understanding of the investment needed to refresh and maintain that environment over the next five years. Develop a future state cost with AWS by modeling what you need rather than what you have today. Include the areas of optimization that are captured in Pillar 1: Cost Savings.

The benchmarks and case studies have repeatedly shown that organizations are able to reduce their IT spend by moving to AWS. If your initial analysis does not show a cost savings for moving to the AWS Cloud, then it is recommended to review to make sure you have included all of the costs. You can find these listed in Figure 2 of the Pillar 1: Cost Savings blog. Additional resources and guidance are also available from the Cloud Economics site.

Staff Productivity

Provisioning infrastructure with automation on AWS removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of operating an on-premises data center. The level of effort is typically reduced further when you use Managed Services (refer to blog Pillar 2: Staff Productivity). Taking advantage of cloud scale by Replatforming or Rearchitecting your application can also provide similar gains (refer to blog Post 1 – Unleashing the Power of the Cloud with the AWS Cloud Value Framework (CVF)). IDC’s, Business Value of AWS study showed that by using AWS, there was “73% more staff time for innovation”. Giving staff the opportunity to focus on innovation creates value for your organization. This can be built in to the comparison.

Operational Resilience

Organizations are able to reduce downtime and operational issues using AWS. Operational issues can have a material impact to businesses so you should consider and quantify the impact this will have to your business. Nucleus Research studied organizations journey to the cloud with AWS. They did this to understand how moving applications from an on-premises to public cloud environment affects the security, performance, and availability of those applications. Nucleus Research “found that migrating to AWS substantially improves application availability, reducing both planned and unplanned downtime by 29% and 69%, respectively, and decreasing application latency by 38%” Details of the study can be located here. You can use data from your IT Service Management (ITSM) tool. ITSM tools will log how many incidents and outages you have had, the duration, root cause, resources needed to resolve and remediate the incident. Using this data, it can help you evaluate how it would different using AWS and the business impact.

Business Agility

Businesses are more agile when they can deploy new features and applications faster with reduced errors. Developer productivity tools like Amazon Q Developer can address the speed to value for your developer teams. Andy Jassy, President and CEO at Amazon recently posted in Linkedin the gains he has seen for software development. “The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real).” He explains further the value creation that has also been realized. “The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains.”. Work with business stakeholders to see how addressing productivity enhancements can increase agility.

Sustainability

Research has shown that using AWS, organizations will reduce their carbon footprint compared to on-premises data centers, which should be considered in your assessment. In addition, AWS helps customers to build sustainability solutions ranging from carbon tracking to energy conservation to waste reduction. AWS services can be used to ingest, analyze, and manage sustainability data to provide actionable insights. More guidance and resources on AWS Sustainability can be found here.

The image shows the AWS Cloud Value Framework, which consists of five pillars; Cost Savings, Staff Productivity, Operational Resilience, Business Agility, and Sustainability. Each pillar shows the benefits estimated from blog post 2 (cost saving), 3 (staff productivity), 4 (operational resilience), 5 (business agility), and 6 (sustainability). Each pillar includes: •Cost Savings - Infrastructure cost savings/ avoidance from moving to the cloud. Estimated benefit: $4.67M in IT infrastructure costs over 5 Years. •Staff Productivity - Efficiency improvement by function on a task-by-task basis. Estimated benefit: 36K Hours or $2M* in savings for IT resources •Operational Resilience - Benefit of improved availability, security, and compliance. Estimated benefit: $1.04M in business value through the reduction of operational incidents. •Business Agility - Deploying new features/ applications faster and reducing errors. Estimated benefit: $13M in revenue growth through increased time-to-market for new application features. •Sustainability - Minimizing the environmental impact of business operations. Estimated benefit: 7,276 metric ton reduction over 5 years in carbon footprint. The image sums the total benefit from all pillars with the 5 year estimated benefit by migrating to AWS $21M plus carbon reduction of 7,276 metric tons.

Figure 2: The AWS Cloud Value Framework including example summary of the benefits from pillars one to five

Recommended action plan

To assist in your AWS Cloud assessment, Figure 3 shows the key steps and activities that are needed to quantify the impact. The action plan has a suggested sequence and order to complete your assessment.

The image shows the key steps and activities that are needed to quantify the impact. The action plan has a suggested sequence and order to complete your assessment: 1.Source of Truth: Develop an inventory of resources (servers, databases, storage, network) ideally automated, through tools like Migration Evaluator that captures usage data. 2.Document your scope review the inventory and consider what workloads/resources will be part of the assessment. 3.Cost collection: Work with finance and procurement teams to capture your current spend. Estimate refresh costs and future projects requiring investment. 4.Future pricing: Use the AWS Pricing Calculator to forecast your spend. Include the cost optimization ideas from blog Pillar 1 - Cost Savings. 5.Resource requirements: Capture current staff needed to support the on-premises environment 6.Staff productivity: Review and discuss the benefits of migrating to AWS for IT resources and estimate the impact outlined in Pillar 2 – Staff Productivity 7.Operational Data: Extract current incident data, BCP and DR plans, security audit results, and any impact assessments on the cost of downtime for your business 8. Operational Resilience: apply recommendations in Pillar 3 – Operational Resilience and assess how AWS can help reduce risks, minimize operational incidents, and translate this to business value 9. Top line growth: Work with line of businesses to understand how increasing feature releases or launching new products will differentiate your business in the market and increase revenue. Quantify the benefits as outlined in Pillar 4 – Business Agility 10. Reducing carbon footprint: Investigate your current data center power usage, and carbon footprint. Estimate how this will reduce resource utilization on AWS. Refer to Pillar 5 – Sustainability. 11. Bringing it all together: Review each pillar of the CVF and summarize the impact to your business. Create comparisons for each of the pillars so you can evaluate whether migrating to AWS will have a positive impact to your business

Figure 3: Recommended action plan to assess the impact to your business

You can engage an AWS Migration Competency Partner to help with your assessment. These partners have demonstrated AWS technical expertise and proven customer success in performing migrations.

Final thoughts

AWS Cloud helps businesses to innovate faster, scale efficiently, and optimize costs, fostering a culture of innovation and nearly continuous improvement. Whether you’re a start-up or an enterprise, the AWS CVF offers a clear pathway to cloud success. The CVF leads organizations to understand the value of using AWS is not limited to cost savings. The CVF helps customers understand the business value of moving to and building on AWS.

Additional Support

For additional support and guidance in demonstrating the Business Value, refer to the Cloud Economics Center. Contact your AWS account representative to request a complimentary Cloud Economics assessment.