Minfy Achieves AWS Energy Competency

29 November 2021 in Las Vegas, Nevada — Minfy Technologies, a Bionic Organization, has announced today that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Energy Competency status. This designation recognizes that Minfy has demonstrated deep expertise helping customers leverage AWS cloud capabilities to transform complex business and operational systems, accelerating their transition to a more balanced and sustainable energy future.

Achieving the AWS Energy Competency differentiates Minfy as an AWS Partner with deep expertise and technical proficiency within this industry, including proven customer success in developing solutions across the value chain, from production operations and optimization to commodities trading, new energy solutions, and more. To receive the designation, AWS Partners undergo a rigorous technical validation process, including a customer reference audit. The AWS Energy Competency provides energy customers the ability to more easily select skilled partners to help accelerate their digital transformations with confidence.

“Minfy is proud to achieve AWS Energy Competency designation, following the achievements of the AWS Migration Competency and AWS SAP Competency earlier this year. Our team is dedicated to helping companies achieve their technology goals by leveraging the agility, breadth and depth of cloud services, and pace of innovation that AWS provides,” Said Vikram Manchanda, Minfy CEO. “Minfy will strive to help more energy customers accelerate their digital transformation journey and get one step closer to its core mission of green technology.” 

AWS is enabling scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solutions from startups to global enterprises. To support the seamless integration and deployment of these solutions, AWS established the AWS Competency Program to help customers identify AWS Partners with deep industry experience and expertise.

About Minfy: Minfy’s purpose is to help customers achieve a symbiotic relationship between humans and deep tech. Minfy started as a Born in the Cloud MSP (Managed Service Provider) and is transitioning to a Bionic Organization. Minfy is committed to help accelerate digital transformation of customers in a variety of Industries. Minfy, with its talent base in India, is expanding its market presence internationally in ASEAN, US and UK.

Journey to the Cloud with AWS

Big Tree Entertainment which owns and operate India’s most loved entertainment platform BookMyShow, is one of the oldest and most experienced organisations in the entertainment ecosystem, having been around for over two decades. They strive to enable entities along the entire value chain of the entertainment ecosystem through BookMyShow’s seamless delivery of outstanding user experience for consumers, organisers and partners.

Being India’s largest entertainment platform offering not just tickets for movies, plays, concerts, stand-up comedy and sporting events but also complete execution of live experiences, BookMyShow has contributed immensely to not just the Indian but also global Entertainment ecosystem. They have paved the way for other entertainment service providers by being the first to digitize their offerings through an online ticketing service platform which was how BookMyShow first began. The platform also provides full stack and end-to-end management services for all forms of movies and live events including hospitality, on-ground execution, ingress management & marketing outreach for both partners and consumers to experience the best-in-class entertainment be it out-of-home as it was traditionally or virtual, with offerings delivered safely to consumers’ homes via a virtual streaming experience, thereby covering the entertainment landscape in its entirety.

BookMyShow sells more that 200 million tickets on an annual run rate, which is the largest volume for an online entertainment platform in India. They also approximately get over 200 million monthly customer visits and 5 billion monthly page views on an average. This is a testament to their ability to innovate, respond, be sensitive & agile to changes in Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, and proactively engage with the future. Thus, BookMyShow has done what many organisations fail to do, that is, to consistently stay relevant in their business space.

Here are 2 record-breaking metrics to acknowledge:

• January 2020 created history with the highest number of tickets ever sold at 23 million, for the first time on the platform
• BMS sold 2.1 million movie tickets for a single day on January 12, 2020, the highest ever sold in one day along with 7 consecutive days of 1 million tickets sold each day from January 10th until January 16th, 2020

Pattern of Typical Consumer Usage Traffic Surge Pre-Pandemic: 

• Weekends have more traffic for ticket bookings as opposed to weekdays.
• New blockbusters releases spawn traffic surges, which typically happen every couple of weeks to sometimes months during regular release periods. 
• Extremely high demand live entertainment events like music concerts, comedy stand-ups, theatrical performances, etc usually occur a few times a year. 

As the pandemic hit and a nation-wide lockdown was imposed, BookMyShow was quick to sense the shift in tide and change tack to alter their service portfolio that had catered to out-of-home entertainment for the longest time to enable consumers to find virtual entertainment offerings on their favourite platform. This meant the company’s technology infrastructure was to urgently adapt, accommodate and respond to the ambiguity of the on-going environment. BookMyShow saw a window of opportunity to implement & accelerate their digital transformation in the pandemic. BookMyShow’s many agile transformations through the years to stay strong, resilient and relevant in the face of multiple external downturns has been largely due to a robust technology and product platform built adeptly over several years. 

With the pandemic presenting the opportunity to shift to a smoother digital infrastructure, BookMyShow was looking to further improve their system & process level efficiencies, reduce operational costs significantly, while continuing to remain agile & nimble. This would aid their journey towards being further future-ready while having robust practices & resilient operations all achieved during a period of reduced customer activity.

Thus, adopting the Cloud-based system posed many benefits that would accrue to BookMyShow. A cloud environment enabled BookMyShow to focus its energies & resources on building offerings that provide the ultimate seamless experience for customers. Secondly, the ability to leverage AWS Cloud Services like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, etc, would help accelerate innovation for both core and emerging offerings. Further, the adoption of new technologies helps BookMyShow attract & retain critical talent across functions within the organisation while aiding decision making far more cost effective in the long run, with little need for capital expenditure to buy & maintain infrastructure and elastic operational expenditure thanks to the Pay-as-you-go Model (likening it to a Light Switch).

The entire Cloud Migration Process consist of two phases:

• Phase 1: Rehost – Lift & Shift BMS Site & Services to AWS Cloud (Completed)
• Phase 2: Refactor – Optimize & Adopt Cloud Native Technologies (On-Going)

BookMyShow has always prided itself on rapid time-to-market, a major prerequisite to being a successful organization in the entertainment business space. Therefore, the @minfyteam leveraged infrastructure as a code (IaaC), which served purposefully due to its ability to turn complex systems and environments into a few lines of code, deploying them at a click of a button.

Perhaps a major point of interest is how BookMyShow decided to leverage Gravtion2 for production workloads. It gave us a significant opportunity to improve the price-performance profile of some of the major database workloads that we currently run-on Amazon EC2. We scheduled the start and stop to run in the business hours, and calculated cost projections monthly to realize the savings achieved during the migration period. Therefore, having benchmarked the new Graviton2-based R6g and C6g instances, we have potentially lowered costs by 30% compared to similar workloads on other instances. We take this as a major lesson learned during this transformation journey. 

It has been a remarkable journey for all stakeholders involved — BookMyShow, AWS & Minfy. We would like to thank the leadership from BookMyShow including Parikshit Dar, Mahesh Vandi Chalil, Ashish Gite and the AWS team, Naren Kachroo, Yogesh Lele, Kaushal Sarasia, Renu Menon, Saurabh Shankar for supporting us throughout this journey and making this transformation possible through their technical leadership.

Thanks & Congratulations to the Minfy Team for working relentlessly in the face of challenges, extending their support at any point necessary, and making this transformation seamless. Manish Jain, Shankar TR, V.Satish Kumar, Anant Joshi, Dharshan MR, Sekhar Unnam, Murali K, A Bharath, Ramit S. 

Minfy is a knowledge-driven organization, adopting a bionic approach to enable a symbiotic relationship between humans and deep tech. We help enterprises accelerate Digital Transformation, Cloud Adoption, and Innovation. Minfy has built synergies with Leading Public Cloud Service Providers (AWS), to serve clients across Asia, Europe and USA. Their cloud expertise extends into multiple industries including BFSI, Education, Manufacturing, Healthcare and Public Sector. Minfy with over 220 employees globally, has a credible track record having executed 450+ migrations, resolved 100s of monthly SMBs, 20+ wins in the Public Sector and are consistently growing with a CAGR of ~ 100% YOY, since inception in 2016. 

Mckinsey & Co’s report on How COVID-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point—and transformed business forever suggests, global digital adoption has accelerated by 7 years on average.1 It is clear that the COVID-19 Pandemic has had a massive influence on the adoption of technology, as organizations increasingly recognize the potential of leveraging technology – in automation, AI & ML, Cloud Computing, IOT etc– to make operations resilient, frugal, scalable & precise.

That’s where Minfy comes in. Using our Bionic Approach (to know more click here), we help enterprises accelerate Digital Transformation, Cloud Adoption, and Innovation — with transformative services around Cloud Consulting, Migration Legacy Modernizations, Applications, DB Modernization, and Cloud-Native Application Development. Minfy has built synergies with Leading Public Cloud Service Providers (AWS), to serve clients across Asia, Europe and USA. Our cloud expertise extends into multiple industries including BFSI, Education, Manufacturing, Healthcare and Public Sector. Minfy has a credible track record with 20+ wins in the Public Sector, executed 450+ migrations, resolved 100s of SMBs and are consistently growing with a CAGR of ~ 100% YOY, since inception in 2016.

Covid Context:

In a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world, where pandemics hit, behavioral norms are changing and cost optimization becomes more central to business operations, reliance on cloud computing is rapidly increasing. Cloud Computing has ushered in new waves of disruptive technology that has become increasingly important to the proliferation of industry 4.0 standards.

As Organizations across the world grapple with the new norms of working & resource scarcity, Minfy re-directs it’s focus into creating a pandemic friendly work environment for it’s employees, demonstrating leadership in critical situations, all the whilst making no compromises on delivery. Minfy has its own insight in balancing organizational needs and customer expectations effectively.

Best Practices Utilized for Employees:

For those employees that unfortunately tested positive, Minfy introduced COVID Wellness Leaves, with the assurance that they had complete job security. With this one could avail up to 10 leave days irrespective of the severity of infection, to completely recover and come back recharged. Additionally, special leaves could be availed in case of infection in the family, enabling employees to take time out to care for their loved ones.

Researchers estimate that feeling Anxiety is normal in situations such as critical care admission, unexpected death, secondary stresses, and social isolation before and after COVID-19. These feelings intensify as employees begin to experience lockdown rut. We understood the need for an active orientation to work & life in general. Therefore, we enabled virtual support systems, promoted social interactions through virtual sessions and organized a variety of Wellness Classes in conjunction with Ethika Work Life. Healthier life choices have a positive influence on increasing productivity and decreasing absenteeism.

Minfy recognizes that Work From Home can often become like Living At Office. But, one often has to run an errand for the house, or entertain their growing children, or give themselves time to recuperate from the brutal numbers & stories spread via social media networks. Therefore, managers adopted a flexible approach when dealing with their respective teams, to help those employees adjust to the new routine of life. We recognize the sentiment when Arthur Miller’s Character Willy Loman says, “You can't eat the orange, and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!", And actively strive to enrich our employees with great experiences & growth opportunities, restoring the balance between the employer-employee relationship.

Best Practices Inculcated by the Leadership Team:

The Leadership in the organization adopted a remote-first approach. Our employees were given a variety of necessary resources, including laptops, access to new remote-work enablement software and modes of working were utilized so that their engagement was more productive. Given the nature of work in the industry, challenges may arise at any time. Therefore, Minfy leaders made certain their 24 x 7 availability for team guidance and response to escalations, ensuring that direction was communicated frequently. Additionally, leaders enabled organizational agility by mobilizing Lean Teams. This enabled quicker response time, agility in decision-making, and greater employee engagement & morale from increased empowerment.

The typewriter – the grandfather of a word processor – was once a world-changing invention. The common writing machine or the-then gold standard for creating typed documents had a steady fan following for everything it offered: distraction-free writing, romantic sensibilities and more.

Over the years, this mighty machine found a stiff competitor in computer and gradually got lost while still staying with a microscopic minority. Computer redefined how simple and quick word processing could be. It made writing a collaborative practice; transparently documented and electronically judged. It increased productivity, saved hours of efforts, and happiness (unless you love all things retro). With a computer on your side, you no longer need a typewriter, a copy machine, and even a postal service.

Over the next 5 minutes, you will read –

• Issues with the legacy system
• What is application modernization?
• Roadmap to an effective application modernization
• Needful measures to accelerate legacy migration

The legacy applications relatively share the same story as a typewriter, with one exception: They are still widely used. Once considered revolutionary, their age made them obsolete and non-aligned to the new priorities of changing times. You may find the following –

• Fragmented IT landscape distributed across locations
• Sub-optimal application design that cannot handle new requests
• Dependency on individual resources with specific skills in obsolete programming languages
• Compatibility challenges that threaten business interactions

…Well, the list just begins. While companies continue to invest 80% of their IT budgets on the maintenance of outdated applications, legacy applications increase device dependency, are not papered for change; crash, fail to perform as expected. They are mostly incompatible with modern software systems.

Application modernization serves as a replacement of your legacy systems, step-by-step. It careful identifies the key priorities of the project and strategically plan for execution. Application modernization is all about re-purposing, refactoring, rehosting, re-coding, re-architecting and re-building of your legacy system to realign it with your current business needs and changing market dynamics. The migration of legacy to new application and platforms provide a number of advantages; including

• The creation of the IT landscape with a new architectural paradigm that aligns with the dynamic business needs
• Modern development tools accelerate innovation, make collaboration more fluid and connected
• Short development times result quickly to market products, save money and hours of efforts in testing, development, and deployment
• Applications operating in the cloud offer increased mobility, flexibility, and process automation
• Enterprises can easily migrate their essential and non-essential assets to more effective, scalable Cloud-based systems with increased positive productivity outcomes

On top of that, modernization offers improved compliance, minimizes disruption, lowers risks, and significantly reduce dependency on IT resources More importantly, it eliminates the need for legacy applications to be viewed as a liability.

• Identify the pattern and working system to narrow down on core functionality and process. Develop a practical model of the desired version of the upcoming system comprehensively
• Analyze and deconstruct the available legacy systems into modernizable modules
• Migrate legacy code, functionality into applicable technology and target interface
• Improvise, bring changes as necessary

If you think your business can endure hazardous events and your data is immune from irrevocable loss, think once again!

45% of unplanned downtime is due to hardware failure? Or that 48% of IT providers indicate phishing emails were the cause of ransomware? And 36% say lack of employee training was to blame for cybersecurity mishaps?

Tanium says that Business resilience—or disaster recovery, or business continuity—are like insurance to your business data. You just need to have it just in case something catastrophic occurs. It is something you put in place after a disaster strikes.

This blog highlights the need for Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery for an organization and best practices to implement them.

BC – Business Continuity:

It involves developing roadmap and strategies to ensure business operations continue to run smoothly pre and post-disaster. Change management, service availability, impact analysis and staff replacement can be part of Business Continuity plan.

DR – Disaster Recovery:

It is primarily aligned with the IT resources of an organization. It is all about how a company’s IT department and related resources recover from any form of disaster. Facilitating backup systems, backing up copied data, servers and network restoration will be planned under Disaster Recovery.

Many companies with good reputation often suffer from undesired performance issues. Everything is unpredictable – Market, Customer demands, Environment, and Compliances. So, it is very important to prepare for the worst and face it confidently when needed. In addition, with the current adoption rate of new technologies and making sure mission-critical processes, applications, systems and data are available at all times is a challenge.

This is when BC/DR comes to the rescue, which is a combined set of processes and techniques used to facilitate the company’s recovery from a disaster and promote the routine business activities without any breakdown.

Nearly 40-60% of small businesses who lose access to operational systems and data without a DR plan close their doors forever. Companies that can recover do so at a much higher cost and a longer timeframe than companies who had a formal backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan in place.

In this scenario, technological organizations should contemplate about investing in Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) strategies for long-term benefits. The rapid increase in cloud adoption and increasing need to manage huge data is driving organizations to look at cloud-based backups and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as viable options.

Cyber-attacks: Organizations networks and systems continuously face a number of cyber threats. From viruses, malware to simple hardware and system failures, businesses mission-critical data is never disaster-proof.

People fail – Employees may unknowingly download a potential virus into the system – thereby exposing
the entire business to risk. If the organization does not have enough resources to fix the situation on
time, whole data in the network will be compromised posing a threat to the assets.

Customer data risks – Potentially it is more expensive to retain a customer after the organization loses its data than to invest in BCDR on time before anything catastrophic happens. It may lead to legal lawsuits also.

Traditionally Business Continuity and Data Recovery strategies are implemented on a remote data center. There is a need for complex infrastructure and computing technology to sustain. This prompted businesses to move to cloud solutions which promised to be durable, reliable and available at all costs.  Leaving a company unprepared when trying to come up with a plan of navigating the rough waters of post-disaster damage control is not an effective way of operating.

AWS has many services and technology partners providing disaster recovery solutions due to its vast network of data centers and its wide footprint globally. The data centers available avoid a single point of failure and are fault tolerant when an attack happens possible due to availability zones and edge locations.

AWS ensures RPO in few seconds with the help of the Cloud. Durability Record of AWS is 99.999999999% also known as 9×11’s in the industry. Using automation and orchestrations RTO is reduced to minutes.

When thinking about cloud security, it’s ultimately up to you to determine the proper  Business Continuity And Disaster Recovery plan in place.  Nowadays, Federal & State laws are insisting on having a business continuity model in place. Data recovery is considered as the highest priority of cloud adoption.

Minfy Technologies is the most trusted  AWS Advanced Consulting Partner.  As AWS Managed Service Partner, we ensure a 100% success record with more SAP on AWS than any other company. We are pioneers of AWS cloud migrating Microsoft workloads and DevOps.  We also provide cloud consulting and application development in emerging technologies like AI/ML.

Our native customer base is across verticals.  Check out how Minfy Tech Helps Government IT Department Modernize with AWS Cloud, where Government of Manipur’s department of IT adapted AWS Cloud Framework to migrate their critical services on to the cloud.

If your organization is migrating PB/TB’s of data into the cloud. The most common procedure is to load the data into a physical appliance with data, then ship the appliance to a cloud provider. There’s an old-school principal.

Any large-scale data migrations can incur high network costs. They would take unrealistically long transfer times. No matter how fast is your networks can take months and years to move terabytes and petabytes of data from an on-premises data center to a public cloud provider.

We have a simple method that reduces the transfer time in the most cost-effective manner. This blog gives you AWS Snowball a shippable storage device for migrating petabyte-scale data sets into the cloud. How Minfy helped a media company to migrate their TB’s of data into the cloud

Manually migrating large-scale data is a time-consuming undertaking. Most wide area networks suffer from extended delays transmitting thousands of terabytes of data, stretching from hours to months.

On-premise workloads are predicted to shrink from 37% today to 27% of all workloads by 2020. 

Migrating huge amounts of both structured and unstructured data involve detailed planning, expensive software purchases, effective execution roadmap, proper cleanup and error corrections, speedy and seamless access transfer, data elimination from existing storage facility and validation. Streaming data brings in a new dimension of higher velocity and real-time processing constraints into the picture. Velocity differs based on the type of application and quality of data to be transferred.

Transferring petabytes amount of data in itself takes a long time, in addition, computing and performing analytics takes even longer threatening agility of the organization. This also affects the organizations to innovate and embrace emerging trends like IoT, Artificial Intelligence and Edge Computing.  Another issue is having a centralized management location for diverse infrastructures, having defined access roles (RBAC)  at the project level and BU level is imperative in the current global working space. Diverse teams, multiple sites, different infrastructure requirements increase operational costs to large scale as developing, deploying and operating take a long time and increase overhead costs to a large scale.

Snowball from AWS is a petabyte-scale data transport solution that is used to transfer large amounts of data into and out of the AWS cloud. It is designed to intelligently address common large-scale data transfer challenges. Snowball is simple, fast, more secure, and can be as little as one-fifth the cost of transferring data via high-speed Internet.

You can opt to use a single AWS Snowball device to transport multiple terabytes of data, or use multiple devices in parallel to transfer petabytes of data. Additionally, AWS Snowmobile truck-size option can help you in transforming exabyte data into the cloud.

Seamless migration

AWS Snowball is being used by enterprises for migrating huge volumes of data – regardless of complexities and types across uses and sizes. Genomics data, analytics, backups, migration projects, video libraries, and image repositories – what you want to migrate, you can effortlessly do so without expecting the vulnerabilities and barriers of migration.

Time 

Transferring 100 terabytes of data, for example, may take more than 100 days over a dedicated 100

Mbps connection

Moreover, it may so happen that if the connectivity breaks the transfer may start all over again. With Snowball devices, the desired activity can be completed within a week or less without a data loss guarantee.

Highly compatible and scalable

The Snowball device is very easy to connect to your existing systems, and provides endless scalability advantages.

AWS Snowball is cost effective

It is very affordable when compared with the cost associated with data for high-speed Internet transfers. With obvious benefits, it delivers seamless migration facility at a cheap price It also offers easy data retrieval benefits

AWS Snowball is a service that expedites the transfer of large amounts of data into and out of cloud using physical storage devices, bypassing the internet. These physical storage devices transfer data at faster-than internet speed over the regional carriers, complete with E Ink shipping labels. This data is then transferred into the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

The Snowball appliances and provides powerful interfaces that you can use to create jobs, transfer data, and track the status of your jobs through to completion. Since the devices can be directly sent to the customers, it is easy to receive and share volumes of business data with stakeholders.

It has an 80TB model for all regions and the 50TB only for the USA. It transfers data to S3 in an encrypted format, protecting the data. Jobs are managed through a management console or programmatically through the job management API. AWS Snowball Management Console and the job management API for creating and managing jobs.

The media company is headquartered in Kolkatta. had a massive inventory of data in TB.  Managing and migrating such large streams of rich content required for them to use huge volumes of manpower expertised in the implementation of cloud migration.

The company continuously uploads new digital content on its platform and anticipates seamless media consumption for its target audience. The tape drive backup system, because of its portability and adaptability limitations made it relatively challenging to provide its audience with instant and endless access to content-rich programs. The company wanted to achieve cost-effective outcome while retaining their expectations in performance, stability, compatibility, and compliance

Minfy extracted 100 TB data out of the Tape Drives and moved on to AWS using AWS Snowball. Files transferred using Snowball were also moved directly to Glacier for archival. AWS File Gateway was configured to move daily delta files directly on to AWS S3 Files stored on AWS S3 as the primary storage with Intelligent Tier enabled. The Intelligent storage class is a low cost and optimizing it by the data access patterns, not compromising with the performance or operational overhead. It moves data between two access tiers – frequent and infrequent access tiers – when access pattern changes, ideal for data with changing access patterns.

The data is moved to Glacier from Amazon S3 based on lifecycle policies via the AWS Management Console, which set rules to configure the movement of data to Glacier. It can be either transition or expiration which decides the cost of data management.

This is applied to the S3 buckets, by selecting the appropriate bucket and going to the Management tab to Add Lifecycle Rule. Here the rules are added with a name and selecting what versions of data are transferred, after how many days. Later an expiration date can be specified, which will permanently delete data from S3 after a given number of days. The files can be restored from Glacier to be moved to S3 by specifying how long to be accessible on S3 and retrieval types – Bulk, Standard and Expedited.

The lifecycle rules are highly useful when the data only needs to be available on S3 for a specified amount of time like periodic logs or some those need to be archived like digital media as in the case of our project. Broadly there are GET bucket lifecycle, PUT bucket lifecycle and DELETE bucket lifecycle.

For a company to sustain the unpredictable competition that is waiting to happen tomorrow, CIOs need to be a leader and strategist today. They are no longer maintenance heads, who traditionally found themselves in seemingly shifting job descriptions, taking care of everything hardware and software, maintenance, security, and implementation is all about.

But, any Chief Financial Officer will naturally have questions about huge new technology transitions. Because the cloud won’t happen in the snap of a finger and it involves certain investment, you need to set the floor to convince your CIO on moving to the cloud.

As it seems today, they are phasing through transformational changes; delivering business value in each stage, addressing evolving technology challenges every second, exploring new growth opportunities in a competitive landscape, gathering insights to implement positive change in the company. The CIO we knew yesterday no longer exists. S/he is more agile, skilled and focused. Thanks to Cloud!

Surprisingly enough, some CIOs are still fighting cloud adoption. Reasons? Perhaps, a few questions they are yet to find answers to –

Will cloud deliver more security than my internal data center?

Will my cloud provider be a position to maintain my desired uptime standards?

What about scalability, deployment barriers, and legacy migration challenges?

What if we lack documentation for outdated legacy systems?

Will our existing employees adapt to the Cloud culture?

More importantly, am I ready for the Cloud?

It would be unjustified if we blame some CIOs for their cloud unpreparedness. If they are fighting the cloud, there must be some inherent organization-wide issue as well. Probably the top decision maker has not been convinced enough, or the team comprises of old and tired employees who don’t want to step out of their comfort level or they are finding it hard to explore tangible cloud benefit.  This is where the necessity of innovative cloud literacy comes.

If you are a stakeholder of a company that you think can hugely benefit from cloud adoption because you know and see it works, here are a few ways you can convince your CIO to move to the cloud.

Source: LogicMonitor’s survey is predicting that 41% of enterprise workloads will be run on public cloud platforms (Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and others) by 2020

Many CIOs are not at all bothered about controlling costs. If they see business continuity requires investment, they do not bother money flowing in. In fact, this is natural. Cost control can be a priority, but many a time, it does not guarantee transformation. Delivering business outcome does. CIOs who think on this line have a lot to gather from the Cloud.

If transformation is all about growing steadily, while remaining relevant in the evolving digital race, Cloud benefits a company in the following ways –

It can drive valuable and measurable business insights with advanced analytical capabilities. This facilitates effective decision-making and strategy building. Since CIOs need to take the proactive decision, the cloud is their secret sauce of success.

With the cloud, stakeholders can remotely access files without device, location and time barriers. They also work seamlessly – without strict governance and limitations (if not required). What do all of these mean? Higher productivity, improved collaboration capacities. At the end of the day, the benefit passes down to the customer. They experience improved service and show more interest in becoming retained paying customers.

A huge financial and competitive concern for many companies will be what
they’ll do if their data is lost/corrupted/inaccessible. This can have extensive economic implications, some of which could send a business into falling completely flat. A great thing about cloud storage is that if data is lost on local machines like computers or phones, the data is still accessible. At the very least 90% of the files will be accessible if a network failure has caused the trauma. The biggest advantage is having your
data continually backed up across various servers which can restore anything you’ve lost.

Managing traditional on-prem change is fairly direct:

A typical  “waterfall” approach leads us to somewhere with different kinds of impacts.  Let’s think about requirements gathering. In a waterfall approach, we typically look at requirements at the outset. You revisit them as development progresses. The base for the application coder is everything that is progressing from point A to B to Z in lock-step.

In the cloud …

On the other hand, the journey to the cloud is agile, flexible and iterative.  The sprints for the cloud are very different from those involving legacy data centers. As you proceed with these sprints, more activities will be layered onto previous ones. Your stakeholder’s feedbacks  stay open and flexible to new developments.

It provides elasticity – something, which is extremely important every CIO would believe. With Cloud, A business can instantly provision computing capacity to address spikes in demand

Time has always been money. In today’s digital age, it is gold. When your in-house employees have few low-level tech issues to deal with, they have more time fixing more mission-critical challenges and their ability to seamlessly access files from anywhere, anytime makes them super productive every time.

The last decade has seen businesses increasingly moving their application workloads from on-premise to the cloud. SAP being one of the most business-critical applications, there have been considerable discussions around migrating SAP workloads to the cloud and choosing the right cloud vendor.

Two of the leading players in the market, Azure and AWS, both offer great support for running SAP workloads. AWS being a market leader has a rich ecosystem of solutions and integrations that can benefit your SAP implementation. However, Azure is also fast expanding its repertoire of solutions.

The choice of AWS or Azure depends primarily on what best meets business requirements, and the existing IT infrastructure and cloud solution in place. However, there are a few well-identified challenges with running SAP on Azure that you might want to consider when evaluating moving SAP to the cloud, or moving SAP from Azure to AWS:

No Dynamic Capacity Planning: Azure has certain constraints on moving and allocating infrastructure resources, which means you cannot dynamically scale your cloud usage up or down in response to changing demand. This can lead to wasteful expenditure in paying for resources that are not in use.

Limited Visibility and Monitoring: Azure offers a limited range of monitoring tools, which means you do not have complete visibility into your infrastructure. This lack of insight can cause a failure to notice core performance issues, thus disrupting business processes. Most businesses adopt additional monitoring software to get around this challenge.

Besides this, Azure is also less flexible when it comes to supporting non-Windows based server platforms.

With over 5000 active customers, AWS looks to be the most preferred cloud solution for running SAP workloads. IDG Research reveals that businesses running SAP workloads on AWS report high satisfaction rating, and have reaped significant benefits. 96% of businesses surveyed say that choosing AWS has reduced their total cost of ownership (TCO). They also report an increase in savings by upto 26%.

But that’s just the beginning.

Here’s a closer look at the diverse range of benefits that businesses stand to gain, once they move their SAP workloads to AWS:

Easy Provisioning, High Scalability

Migrating SAP workloads onto AWS gives you a highly available, robust and scalable infrastructure to launch and manage your business critical applications. It eliminates the need for investing in costly and time-consuming infrastructure purchases and deployment, allowing you to launch SAP systems in minutes. And this improved time-to-market is highly valuable in today’s disruptive market conditions.

The close partnership between AWS and SAP means that customers can leverage a range of solutions designed specifically deliver these benefits:

• AWS Quick Start to streamline deployment of SAP HANA production environments, in accordance with best practices from both SAP and AWS.

•  Integrating SAP workloads with AWS CloudFormation and Amazon CloudWatch to automate resource provisioning and other system maintenance.

Your teams also do not have to engage in complex capacity planning to ensure optimal use of budgets and resources. With flexible computing solutions and pricing models, AWS allows you to scale up or scale down infrastructure usage in response to fluctuating requirements. You can add or remove compute, networking and storage instances as required, to actively keep up with evolving workloads. And this is a key advantage that AWS delivers over Azure.

One of the key reasons businesses choose AWS for SAP is because it offers a complete cloud environment for business innovations. The fact that SAP and AWS have been working together since 2011 means that businesses have access to a set of solutions that have been honed over the years to anticipate and solve real customers needs around application performance and agility. So we have:

•  A range of Amazon EC2 instances optimized for specific SAP workload needs. One of these is X1, which has been purpose-built with Intel® Xeon® E7 processors. It meets the strict performance requirements for in-memory databases such as SAP HANA and other big data and enterprise workloads.

•  Pre-built system images are available on AWS for certain SAP solutions, allowing businesses to deploy a ready-to-go, preconfigured SAP system in a matter of minutes.

Dedicated SAP customer support for businesses running SAP on AWS.

These savings occur across several aspects:

•  Lower cost of purchasing and maintaining physical infrastructure

•  Improved and simplified operational processes which minimize spends across process design, technical set-up, project management and testing

•  Lower cost on continuous improvements and activities such as application and system upgrades

•  Ability to dynamically manage resource usage in response to changing requirements

The cost benefits delivered by AWS also compound over time, with businesses that have been using it for a longer period to run their SAP reporting higher cost savings.

While there are several approaches to migrating applications between clouds, not all of them yield similar results. When it comes to moving SAP workloads, it is important to plan a detailed migration strategy so as to ensure minimal disruption for the business. And hence, it is advisable to know the possible challenges to expect during migration, and how to work around them.

CloudEndure may not work

One way to migrate SAP from Azure to AWS is by using CloudEndure Migration. It offers an automated cloud migration solution with a lift-and-shift approach. However, what appears to be a simple enough solution on paper can run into several roadblocks once executed:

•  The CloudEndure agent does not support Linux Suse12 SP3 servers for Azure to AWS migration

•  Azure and AWS have different Hardware Virtual Machine (HVM) layers, with varying processor families, leading to compatibility issues

•  This can result in having to move all your applications and databases manually from Azure to AWS, which can be an extremely error-prone and cost-intensive process

It is possible to work through these challenges individually, like adopting a different migration path for Linux servers or choosing to move ahead with manual migration of databases. But the overall migration process in itself remains inefficient and can bring down the productivity and performance of the final implementation.

So it’s advisable that you find a more comprehensive solution to migrate SAP workloads from Azure to AWS.

Leveraging AWS Server Migration Service

Starting, April 2019, Amazon announced support for Azure to AWS migration with the AWS Server Migration Service (SMS). Currently, AWS SMS is one of the best methods to migrate your SAP workloads running in Microsoft Azure to AWS Cloud. You can discover your virtual machines running SAP on Azure, bundle them into applications, and swiftly move them to AWS. The key advantages of this are:

•  Completely eliminate the hassles of replicating individual servers or decoupling application dependencies

•  Reduce time taken for migration

•  Reduce the risk of errors during migration and any consequent downtime