OREANDA-NEWS. July 12, 2016. The cloud long ago moved from enterprise possibility to reality, with 95% of respondents to the 2016 RightScale State of the Cloud survey saying they are using cloud. What’s changing is the degree to which cloud is becoming a part of everyday enterprise operations.

Respondents to IDC’s 2016 CloudView Survey think that within three years, they will access 78% of IT resources through some form of cloud, whether public, private or hybrid.

But while cloud migration has become more common, it hasn’t become worry-free. According to a survey by the Cloud Security Alliance, the biggest concern for 68% of companies moving systems of record to the cloud is the ability to enforce corporate security policies. The next biggest concern, cited by 61% of respondents, is complying with regulatory requirements.

These and other issues surrounding cloud migration will be discussed by IT leaders attending the AWS Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., starting July 12. We’re looking forward to joining the conversation to talk about our Data Migration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution.

Data Migration with AWS is built on Platform Equinix™ products and services, AWS Direct Connect, and a number of our cloud-connected storage and managed service ecosystem partners. It’s implemented in four steps:

1. Complete Assessment and Design: A workload, application and architecture assessment by Equinix Professional Services for Cloud (EPS Cloud) comes first to help determine what will live in AWS and what stays on-premises. EPS Cloud will create a strategic migration roadmap and a future-state AWS infrastructure design, and it will provide secure and reliable interconnection solutions that guarantee high performance, low latency and maximum control when moving data to the cloud.

2. Establish Secure Connectivity and Configuration: EPS Cloud helps establish a private, long-line connection to AWS via AWS Direct Connect in an Equinix data center. The enterprise can then move cloud-ready applications and workloads directly to AWS on a secure, high-performance connection.

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Figure 1. Connectivity and Configuration

3. Enable Hybrid Architectures and Migration. This is necessary because higher-risk workloads and applications need a hybrid architecture, so mission-critical applications can remain on-premises, while less sensitive workloads move to the cloud. That keeps sensitive data and applications controlled and compliant, while enabling high-performance connectivity to AWS for compute and storage services.

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Figure 2. Hybrid Enablement and Migration

4. Choose Managed Services. Several managed service providers in the Amazon Partner Network ecosystem (Unitas Global, Synoptek, Logicworks, Dimension Data, etc.) can operate the hybrid cloud environment. A cloud-based managed service business model enables IT organizations to turn their CAPEX into more cost-effective OPEX.

A Faster, Easier Cloud Migration in Action

The success of Data Migration with AWS isn’t theoretical. A global engineering firm used EPS Cloud to help speed up its migration to a scalable cloud infrastructure that now serves the company worldwide.

This business must deliver compute-intensive modeling applications to employees worldwide, at any time, but its prior infrastructure couldn’t consistently pull this off. The enterprise decided to migrate to a cloud infrastructure that would reduce run times and support future initiatives related to the IoT, drone mapping and application modernization.

The company wanted AWS to be one of its preferred vendors and to incorporate the Equinix Cloud Exchange and Equinix Performance Hub solutions. But it needed a partner that could help the company do that quickly and stay with them for the long term. EPS Cloud fit the bill.

EPS Cloud and the company executed a plan to move 80% of its application workloads to the cloud, with the other 20% distributed to Performance Hub. The migration has enabled the enterprise to achieve big cost savings and reduced latency, which has led to improved application responsiveness and faster model processing.

Please read the full case study. Hope to see you at Equinix booth #318 at the AWS Summit, Santa Clara!