Phase 3 - Gaining momentum and optimization - Public Sector Cloud Transformation
Programs

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Phase 3 - Gaining momentum and optimization

Programs

Once you have garnered a certain level of maturity and have begun advancing your cloud journey beyond initial pilots and migrations, your organization will be able to take advantage acceleration and cost savings programs.

Migration Acceleration Program

The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) is designed to help enterprises committed to a migration journey achieve a range of these business benefits by migrating existing workloads to AWS. MAP has been created to provide consulting support, training and services credits to reduce the risk of migrating to the cloud, build a strong operational foundation and help offset the initial cost of migrations. It includes a migration methodology for completing legacy migrations in a methodical way, as well as robust set of tools to automate and accelerate common migration scenarios. By migrating to AWS, enterprises can focus on business innovation instead of dedicating time and attention to maintaining their existing systems and technical debt. Sacrifices and painful trade-offs no longer have to be made to get something to market quickly. Enterprises can focus on differentiating their business in the marketplace and taking advantage of new capabilities.

MAP methodology

The Migration Acceleration Program consists of a three-step approach for migrating to AWS that includes the following:

  • Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) phase — As discussed earlier, the MRA phase determines the current state of your readiness to migrate and identifies areas where you already have strong capabilities and where further development is needed to migrate at scale. The MRA is based on the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) and evaluates cloud readiness along eight dimensions (landing zone, operating model, security and compliance, migration process experience, skills and center of excellence, migration plan and business plan). The MRA typically involves a one-day workshop conducted by AWS and/or a MAP Partner.

  • Migration Readiness & Planning (MRP) phase — During the MRP phase, you will team with AWS Professional Services and/or a MAP Partner to build the foundation for a large-scale migration and gain experience migrating and operating several workloads on AWS. AWS and MAP partners have developed a prescriptive methodology and approach based on best practices gleaned from hundreds of customer migration projects that significantly reduce time to migrate while lowering cost and risk. To prepare a cloud operational foundation, you will follow an agile approach with workstreams for cloud center of excellence, landing zone, operation model, and security and compliance. In addition, AWS will work with you to develop a strong migration plan and compelling business case that articulates the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) for a cloud migration. At the end of this phase, which is usually completed in 2-4 months, you will be ready to migrate at scale.

  • Migration phase — In the Migration phase, you will complete the migration plan developed during the MRP phase, typically with the assistance of AWS Professional Services and/or a MAP Partner. A key component is establishing a migration factory composed of teams, tools and processes to streamline the movement of workloads from on-premises to AWS. The migration factory teams work through a prioritized backlog of workloads based on migration patterns identified in the portfolio discovery and planning process. Where possible we apply known migration and operational patterns to accelerate the movement of workloads, reduce risk and improve the final outcome. With this approach, you will quickly start to achieve the business benefits of lower operating costs and gaining agility and scalability. Once in the cloud, you can focus on optimization of applications, processes, operations and costs. This phase typically takes 12-24 months to complete.

Experience-based Acceleration

Experience-based Acceleration (EBA) is a transformation methodology designed to help customers accelerate cloud adoption and create sustained momentum for modernization initiatives. EBA brings together the right combination of cloud experience, change management principles, and AWS experts to help customers unblock cloud adoption. Enterprises and governments have leveraged EBA methodology for their strategic migration and modernization initiatives. EBA delivers acceleration workshops and activities called EBA Parties. These workshops align an organization, accelerate decision-making, create new processes, impart training, and change the way people work.

EBA sprint-based activities (virtual and in-person) are called parties, because they are self-contained. They invite representatives from every part of an organization and the hands-on experience is rewarding and fun. Each party has a purpose and brings together specific resources, decision makers, and experts to solve distinct challenge.

The sequence of planned EBAs depends on your customer needs:

  1. Assess — Cloud Acceleration Workshop — The Cloud Acceleration Workshop is an AWS facilitated activity that develops a critical-path roadmap for cloud adoption. Importantly, as part of the process, the activity aligns leader stakeholders, business objectives and known success patterns for enterprise transformation and how to work efficiently and quickly through the roadmap.

  2. Platform Party — Stress test your AWS Landing Zone — Utilizing the Cloud Adoption Framework, the Platform Party is a sprint based, three-day interactive event designed to accelerate the validation of the AWS Landing Zone and the development of the required operating and governance models. This party facilitates identification of needs and blockers to remove in order to get to a full-functioning production platform. Resolving these blockers is often problematic in regular working environments. The Platform Party will facilitate accelerated problem solving, with relevant stakeholders present to resolve points of friction and align to best practices suitable for your environment.

  3. Migration Party — Migrate three applications in three days — The Migration Party is a sprint-based, interactive workshop designed to accelerate application migration. Using AWS CAF, the Migration Party builds on your AWS Landing Zone and focuses on the development of customized patterns that enable your organization for rapid lift and shift or re-factor migrations, operational and governance scaling, and developing a pipeline for applications that are candidates for migration and automation. This workshop is designed to migrate 3-5 applications to AWS in three days and identify blockers and resolve them with cross functional resources.

  4. Modernization Party — Transform applications and build new workflows — The Modernization Party targets customer needs to re-architect applications and business workflows; containerize and/or breaking down applications into micro-services (deconstructing the monolith); and building cloud native applications. Similarly structured to a Migration Party, the Modernization Party utilizes AWS CAF, moving data and workflows to cloud – but as part of re-architecting applications or building net-new capability.

  5. People Party — Build your Cloud Enablement Engine (aka CCOE) — The People Party is a two-day interactive workshop designed to enable an enterprise’s ability to create, sustain and govern the change that occurs to accelerate cloud adoption. AWS experts will work with your organization to build and grow your initial cloud team responsible for strategy and operations. AWS starts with the needs of your internal customer, discussing existing organization structures, current constraints, key roles for delivering value, and map skills and roles to future needs in the context of hiring. Experience-Based Accelerators (EBAs) are a leading AWS customer program designed to provide learn-by-doing workshops that help large enterprises experience new ways of working, communicate, ignite initiatives, and remove barriers to internal transformation.

EBAs are immersive engagements that change the way customers work – from legacy siloed teams to cross-functional empowered teams; from waterfall project-based focus to iterative product-based completion; long-lead analysis to bias for action. For each EBA engagement, cross-functional customer teams and AWS SMEs are collocated for 3-5 days, focused on delivering specific outcomes and starting their transformation journey.