Once in the cloud, lose the on-premises thinking

In the last two years, enterprises have significantly boosted their adoption of cloud technologies. A recent IDG study found that 79% of organizations have at least one application or infrastructure component in the cloud, and another 18% plan to deploy cloud-based applications or infrastructure in the next 12 months.

Many enterprises, however, continue to use the same approach for platform lifecycle management that they used for their on-premises platforms. As a result, many organizations are not leveraging the full array of cloud benefits.

To get the most out of their cloud investment, organizations need a proven assessment and transformation framework that leverages industry best practices, standard operating procedures and tools for automation, throughout the cloud lifecycle. We recommend a four-phased approach:

• Evaluate: Identify current issues and business requirements, including required system availability and compliance needs.
• Design: Finalize the reference architecture for the target infrastructure with scalable sizing, as well as high-availability and disaster recovery for applications according to recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO) and compliance requirements.
• Execute: Implement/migrate using a set of tools, accelerators, standard operating procedures and best practices.
• Optimize: Automate use cases and proactively monitor infrastructure consumption on a cloud orchestration layer.

Case in Point: Pharma Cloud Migration 

We worked with a global pharmaceuticals company to migrate its SAP enterprise software suite from on-premises to AWS cloud. The company was dealing with challenges typical of an on-premises system, including high CapEx, scalability and performance issues, frequent and long unplanned downtime, system availability commitment shortcomings and non-compliance with GxP (a range of pharmaceutical best practices).

We worked closely with AWS to design and build a cloud infrastructure to meet the pharma’s key business requirements, including minimum infrastructure availability of 99.95%, RPO of less than five minutes and RTO of less than two hours on the GxP-compliant, validated environment. Through our pay-per-usage model, the pharma was able to convert its infrastructure spend from a CapEx to OpEx model. As a result, the company saved 60% of its annual operating costs and achieved operational efficiencies by applying use cases on a cloud orchestration layer.

Auto-scaling, one of the key use cases, helped the pharma achieve horizontal scaling during peak business periods, ensuring additional load-handling capability. This scenario is integrated with a consumption-based pricing model, meaning the company pays only for actual usage, while peak workload is addressed at prescribed performance levels. A dedicated team was allocated to handle compliance processes to maintain all documents and validate all tools used in the project.

Today, the pharma is benefiting from high system availability, scalability, improved agility and a pay-per-use model on a validated environment. This has enabled the company to focus more on its business while the cloud takes care of the platform.

Learn more about enabling your digital business on AWS Cloud.