AWS Cloud Migration

Akkodis has significant experience in migrating workloads, including existing legacy Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software for x86 architectures and deploying them in the AWS Cloud.

We design for fault tolerance, automated recoverability, and automated scaling-up on demand, and down when not required.

Cloud Migration Is A Journey

No migration is ever a simple jobs of “click a button and done”. If you see this, its likely to cost more money in cloud spend, or be error prone; it’s likely in marketing, not reality.

Your organization has different priorities for the digital systems, depending on the stakeholders in your organization. Security, performance, reliability. Or perhaps its minimal effort, with underfunded teams unable to do justice for your digital systems.

For small organizations with less than 10 applications, you can do this migration to an optimised, Well-Architected and Well-Maintained environment in around six months to a year. For large enterprises, this is a multi-year journey. Your operating model, cyber security activities, roles and responsibilities are all likely to be affected.

Akkodis works as your trusted partner in this transformation, with a focus on ensuring that your digital systems are able to meet your requirements today, and into the future.

Trusted Partner, Not Supplier

It’s your data. It’s your cloud environment.

Akkodis engineers implement digital solutions for our clients, and we’re well aware of the trust this places on us. We’re also completely aware that these are your systems, and provide clarity in the ongoing support require for the solution, including optionality in how this can be addressed through bolstering your internal capability to support, Akkodis AWS Managed Services, or a mix of both.

Our goal is to exceed your expectations, and to demonstrate expertise in what we do…

What We Do

Advise

Akkodis can facilitate the business strategy and stakeholder engagement in your company to bring a common understanding, detailed plan and clear objective to the process you are undertaking. You will have many options in front of you, some of which you may not understand or be aware of. With Akkodis to guide you, together we will navigate these to gain consense. With a clear flag-on-the hill objective, the rest of the organization can get behind the effort to move your systems forward.

Of course, risk is going to be one key concern. The appetite for downtime is typically low. The complication of software licensing requirements. The percieved or assumed impact of any potential network latency changes. We work with you to make sure a thorough understanding of these needs are known and built into the Migration and ongoing Solution.

We also highlight the operational responsibility that changes (and what stays the same) when you transition to cloud. Key amongst this is the Shared Responsability Model:

Assess

Your digital landscape is your company. You likely do not get funds in without a digital system to issue invoices.

A deep and thorough assessment of your digital systems is a must. The first phase is a light inventory, collecting basis such as:

• Workload Name, software vendor, technology stack, versions
• Workload business criticality
• Current assigned compute and storage
• Identifying workload business owner, technical support/maintenance leads

A second pass is done to dive deeper:

• Workload users: internal, external, usage patterns, authentication, user privileges, service administration
• Underlying infrastructure support: refresh patterns, capacity
• Version supportability matrix: Operating System versions, language runtime versions (eg: Java, .Net), application versions, database versions, protocol versions.
• Supportability: vendor upgrade assessments, data compatability review
• Alternate solutions: SaaS, open source, alternate commercial providers
• Integrations: sinks & sources, security protocols and authentication
• High availability and failover assessment: RTO & RPO, downtime windows (if any)
• Backup & restore: data models, archive time, previous version restore capability
• Network latency assessment: impact of moving workloads to cloud when users are onsite or remote

Architect

Armed with the above assessments, Akkodis AWS Architects then design the replacement service, trying to minimize the ongoing human effort to maintain the system, while providing the maximum agility to make future incremental changes.

The AWS Well-Architected Principles are a strong guide for our teams, and has been since 2014. Akkodis follows an extended “7 R’s” methodology of cloud migration, influenced by the client’s appetite for innovation and long-term versus shorter term benefit.

It’s worth highlighting that this assessment also considers a wholesale replacement of existing systems into fully managed Software as a Service offerings that may replace existing client-run solutions. The appropriateness of SaaS offerings to clients is worth constant review: our experience has found that over time, newer SaaS offerings become easier for clients to adopt and more importantly, secure and maintain over the longer term.

When deploying to the AWS cloud, we implement Infrastructure as Code, in either CloudFormation, or Terraform, as required. This gives repeatability and rapid deployment of the changes being done now, and into the future.

We adhere strictly to client content jurisdiction requirements, and drive costs down at every opportunity. That’s why we’re trusted by government and enterprise alike to help with legacy application migration.

Timing and Scheduling

With a stack-rank of priorities, Akkodis then schedules the migrations of individual workloads. Akkodis schedules our DevOps Engineers, System Administrators, Developers, Change Managers and Testers as required for the scale of the work, with timings focused around your critical business events.

Workloads to be migrated are sorted into a series of waves, each wave containing a set of applications to migrate and validate.

Implementation & Modernization

This is where the deep technical work of creating the cloud deployed version of your workload happens. The Akkodis team is not only experienced, but heavily AWS-certified to demonstrate their expertise in this.

Orchestrate

Change is hard. Akkodis can also assist with change management, with people, process, and not just the technology. Some workloads are only company wide, where as with some of our larger clients, its an entire industry change thats required – particularly in state and federal government.

Operate

Our managed Services offering can help address the question of how to operate workloads as they migrate. From minimal “lights on” support, to full DevOps powered full-stack maintenance and operation, Akkodis can keep your digital systems humming.

Training Your Team

As an AWS Authorized Training Partner in multiple countries, Akkodis instructors can deliver to your teams the official AWS courses. See more here.

The Akkodis engagement

We break our engagement into three sections, following the recommended AWS Migration Acceleration Program schedules. This gives our clients the flexability to have preditable engagements, and the option to delay, modify or suspend their progress at these break points.

• Assess: build the business case for change, establish high level requirements, rapid discovery, and align the business stakeholders
• Mobilize: deeper dive requirements, deep discovery, detailed business case, define post-migration operating models and responsibiliites, skills requirement analysis, AWS account establishment, cloud foundational Landing Zone (Accounts) and connectivity, potential initial small sample migration
• Migrate & Maintain: execution of the workload migrations

To get started, please contact Akkodis.