Accelerating your

AWS journey:
Migration and modernization
for public sector organizations
Table of contents
How can I drive sustainable transformation?..................................... 3

Why are migration and modernization important to software

organizations today?.................................................................... 5

Why should I modernize my application portfolio?. . ........................... 7

How should I rethink my application portfolio?................................. 8

What are my options as I adopt the cloud?...................................... 10

How do I modernize effectively and efficiently?............................... 13

Why should I choose AWS to help me with migration

and modernization?.. .................................................................. 16

Additional resources. . ................................................................. 17

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How can I drive sustainable
transformation?
Today’s software-driven organizations want to become more agile so they can
innovate and respond to changes faster. However, they also manage a portfolio
of complex applications and workloads that were built over a long period of
time.

When software organizations re-evaluate their application portfolios, they

have the opportunity to consider function, features, and strategic requirements
and which applications to retain and which to retire. They may choose to move
some applications to the cloud to gain total cost-of-ownership (TCO) benefits
or invest in rewriting the applications in a cloud-native manner to maximize
agility. We call these decisions The 7 Rs:

• Retain • Repurchase

• Retire • Replatform

• Relocate • Refactor

• Rehost

The 7 Rs are part of the cloud journey toward realizing the benefits offered
by Amazon Web Services (AWS). With an understanding of the technical
architecture and user value of applications, all organizations are better
equipped to make sound decisions.

As our customers pursue the reality of migration and operating in a cloud-first

development environment, they often tell us that their ability to move fast on
the right path is a critical differentiator. Without speed, organizations begin
to lose momentum and executive buy-in wanes. When results are realized too
slowly (or aren’t properly quantified and communicated), the business case
weakens—potentially jeopardizing the project’s financing and support. For
many software organizations, moving to the cloud quickly is the best first step.

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“Migrating our network to AWS Specifically, migrating with AWS leads to an average infrastructure cost savings of 66
percent, with substantial benefits extending into other metrics. Migrating applications
and modernizing our applications
with AWS results in a 43 percent lower time to market for new features, a 29 percent
that process over US$1.5 trillion boost in staff productivity, and 45 percent fewer security-related incidents.1
in healthcare claims has let us
transform the scalability of our
service delivered to the nation’s
hospitals and health plans. We Further, AWS customers we’ve identified as
improved our development transformation and modernization “high
velocity and reliability using performers” are greatly outpacing the status
native AWS capabilities.” quo. These companies establish 46x more
Neil de Crescenzo, President & CEO, releases, 400x faster lead times, 170x faster
Change Healthcare mean times to recover (MTTR), 90% more
automation, and a 5x lower failure rate.

By re-evaluating their application portfolios—and considering whether migration

or modernization is the best approach for each application—software organizations
can improve agility and increase innovation. Approaching modernization in a unified,
holistic way can reduce costs and help build and maintain the momentum needed to
sustain long-term transformation.

¹ “Maximizing Economic Advantages by Migrating to AWS Cloud Infrastructure,” Enterprise Strategy Group, 2023
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Why are migration and
modernization important to
organizations today?
Today’s software organizations are generally tasked with achieving three critical
objectives. First, they must respond to user demands. This requires fast, dynamic
scalability—the ability to quickly and reliably scale up to meet the needs of millions
of users and back down when demand subsides, again and again, all without wasting
budget.

Next, competitive pressures are charging today’s IT professionals with the often-
contradictory goals of succeeding in an increasingly crowded marketplace while also
reducing costs.

Finally, IT professionals must continuously e new users, delighting them with Today’s CPOs must pivot to
applications that meet their needs in exciting ways.
different directional priorities
at a moment’s notice—while
also pursuing all of them
simultaneously

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IT professionals are meeting these challenges through application
modernization and transformation of their infrastructure. They’re
Migration and modernization
pivoting to new models, developing unique and engaging experiences, These terms can have many different meanings, depending on their
enabling remote working and remote learning for staff, and optimizing contexts. But, for simplicity and clarity, here’s how we use these
processes for greater agility, more frequent application development, words within the pages of this eBook:
and cost reduction.

Cloud migration is often an essential component of these strategies.

The cloud enables faster and more frequent application releases, cost
reduction through greater management efficiency and data center
consolidation, and the freedom to direct more resources toward
innovation by outsourcing administrative tasks.

In recent conversations we’ve had with leading technology decision

makers, we’ve found that organizations are discovering greater success
Migration
by rethinking their application portfolios and the role of migration
Moving infrastructure and applications with a cloud provider without
in modernization strategies. By viewing migration as an enabler and
making any changes to the architecture. Often called rehosting or
accelerator of modernization instead of a separate initiative, these
“lift-and shift,” this can be the fastest way to start realizing benefits
leaders are achieving faster, more efficient, and more sustainable results
from the cloud.
across all of their key imperatives.

Modernization
The adoption of cloud-native technologies (like AWS Lambda and
containers) to reduce operational burdens and maximize cloud
value. This is generally achieved via replatforming to managed cloud
services or refactoring (also called rearchitecting) applications.

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Why should I modernize my “We’ve reduced our hosting
costs by thirty percent with
application portfolio? AWS, because we can spin
up different development,
staging, user acceptance
Modern applications increase agility by lowering the time required to build, deploy,
and maintain applications that can automatically scale to the needs of the workload. testing, or performance testing
Using the AWS serverless platform, the National Resident Matching Program, decreased environments to test the system
hosting costs by 30% while supporting 1000% increased traffic volume.² and spin it all down when it’s no
Modern applications also reduce TCO by improving operational efficiency and resource
longer needed...saving that kind
utilization. By building modern applications, software organizations can reduce their of money is important for us as a
app development costs by 68 percent and lower their TCO.³ nonprofit with a limited budget.”

From conversations we’re having with organizations all around the world, we’re Nicole Nitowki, CIO, National Resident
learning that it’s more important than ever for modernization efforts to be Matching Program
accompanied by cost optimization. But software organizations don’t have to
compromise on cost when they modernize—modernizing applications can reduce costs
and enable rapid innovation.

“The National Resident Matching Program Works with Pariveda and AWS to Quickly Bring Matching
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2

Service to the Public Sector,” AWS Case Study

3
“Build Modern Applications on AWS,” AWS
How should I rethink my
application portfolio?
All IT professionals are portfolio managers. An application portfolio can be
built up over years, if not decades. As cloud economics offer a disruptive
opportunity to change, few if any organizations have a large enough IT staff
to modernize their entire portfolios at once.

Every software organization’s approach to technology modernization

will be somewhat different, just as every organization has its own unique
challenges and technology landscape. Success will hinge on a complex web
of intersecting and divergent elements. However, with over 18 years of
experience helping organizations adopt the cloud, we have identified some
commonalities and patterns that can significantly help the transformation
of an IT posture.

For a larger strategy to be successful, software organizations will need

to reduce the size of their application portfolio so that their team can
effectively migrate and modernize without overstraining its resources. This
is primarily achieved through two methods: replacement and retirement.

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For some applications, the best approach is to replace them with new
Make a plan for your application portfolio
offerings across software as a service (SaaS), serverless architecture,
and containers. We’ve learned from our customers that most Focus on differentiators
organizations discard 20%–30% of their application portfolios in
favor of replacement sets from SaaS vendors. Oftentimes, customers
rely on the AWS Marketplace to enable their SaaS strategy.

Retire Reduce
As software organizations review their application portfolio,
the size of the estate
they will find that other applications simply need to be retired.
through a mix of
Perhaps the applications’ capabilities have become outmoded or
application retirement
redundant, or it’s discovered that maintaining them requires undue SaaS
and SaaS replacement
financial resources, time, and workforce commitments. Whatever
the case, retiring these applications further lightens the migration
and modernization load, leading to faster results that help satisfy
stakeholders and strengthen executive buy-in. Move
the bulk of the
Rehost remaining application
portfolio working with a
single cloud provider as
quickly as possible
AWS Marketplace
AWS Marketplace enables software companies to use
trusted vendors when migrating workloads to the cloud. Transform
This enables a shift from in-perpetuity licensing to Replatform the migrated applications,
subscription-based, elastic metering and billing. We see where developers and
customers increasingly embrace serverless models and +
engineers can take
container-based deployment—both of which contribute Refactor advantage of the new
to substantially lower compute costs. cloud environment

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What are my options as I adopt
the cloud?
Software organizations that migrate a substantial part of their application portfolio early
in their journey and combine those efforts with modernization initiatives generally drive
the fastest results. Migration is often the first step in successful modernization. While every
customer’s migration journey is unique, we have often seen a standardized process take shape.
This process can generally be broken into three phases of activities:

Assess Mobilize Migrate and

on-premises resources address gaps uncovered modernize
in assessment application portfolio

In order to build an effective migration and modernization plan, software companies need
to ensure that they have a comprehensive strategy that identifies the best patterns for their
application portfolio to achieve results faster.

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The 7 Rs: Common use
cases and deployment
When teams deeply understand the company’s application portfolio
and the goals of the business, they’re well equipped to choose the
next path for each application. The 7 Rs help categorize what is in
the environment, what the interdependencies are, and the technical
complexities of migration. From there, begin to create a plan on how to
migrate each application or set of applications.

AWS Outposts
Realize the benefits of AWS services and innovations
by “migrating and modernizing in place” with AWS
Outposts. This service enables software organizations
to use the same AWS infrastructure, services, and tools,
both on premises and in the AWS Cloud, for a truly
consistent hybrid environment throughout the migration
and modernization process.

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1 Rehost
Quickly moving applications to the cloud without changing them
5 Refactor
Changing the way applications are architected and developed, usually
by employing cloud-native features

2 Replatform
Making a few optimizations to applications—but without changing
their core architecture, such as moving from self-managed
6 Repurchase
Replacing the current environment by moving to a newer version of
Kubernetes to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) software or purchasing an entirely new solution

3 Relocate
Move infrastructure to the cloud without purchasing new hardware,
7 Retire
Identifying assets that are no longer useful and turning them off,
rewriting applications, or modifying your existing operations strengthening the business use case by focusing on more widely
used resources

4 Retain
Leaving the application on premises—or now, at least upgrade

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How do I modernize
effectively and efficiently?
When we talk about modernizing the application portfolio, we’re
primarily referring to two specific patterns in The 7 Rs: refactor and
replatform. Let’s explore each of these patterns again, including
real-world success stories to help illustrate what refactoring and
replatforming application portfolios may look like.

Refactor: Refactoring means rearchitecting an application into a more

modular design, commonly referred to as microservices or modular
architecture. The process of refactoring can offer high rewards—
adopting modular architectures with serverless technologies improves
agility by lowering the time and resources necessary to build, deploy,
scale, and maintain applications. It also reduces TCO by improving
operational efficiency and resource utilization.

With modular services, there are more moving parts to manage,

which is why we recommend adopting serverless technologies as
much as possible (a serverless-first strategy) to eliminate operational
overhead. Most customers approach refactoring by automating
software delivery, wrapping the applications with APIs, and decoupling
application components. But new applications can be built from the
ground up with this modular design and technology to achieve these
benefits from the start.

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Business-critical applications are prime candidates for refactoring. For example, data The Japanese Government’s
warehouses connect organizations to their customers, mobile applications generate
Digital Agency used
new revenue and competitive differentiation for the organization, and backend
services power the organization by driving efficiency. When applications in their
generative AI and “live
current form are not fast enough, not scalable, have poor resource utilization, or reference architectures” to
require a lot of cost and operational overhead to maintain, refactoring is often the migrate systems, resulting in:
best path forward.

Refactoring to microservices also lends itself to the creation of small, independent

800
teams that take ownership of each service. This organizational change fosters an
environment of innovation for development teams, giving them the authority to
make changes with a lower risk to the organization as a whole.
Systems migrated with AI assistance

“...utilizing reference architectures along with REDUCED

generative AI reduces the burden on government development and review time
cloud users and realizes fast and efficient system
building.”

Shinichi Nishihata, Cloud Engineer, Japan’s Digital Agency IMPROVED

security and resilience

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Replatform: Replatforming involves moving from self-managed services to fully managed Babylon Health accelerated
cloud services—but without changing the core architecture of the applications. Teams
its mission to provide
will typically choose this option for applications that they feel need to be reshaped to
match the organization’s overall cloud strategy or to better take advantage of the native
affordable healthcare using
capabilities of their cloud provider. Cloud providers should be able to provide assistance AWS services to:
throughout this process.

Specifically, AWS offers managed services that enable a reduction in operational overhead Develop applications using fast
microservices architecture
without rewriting code. For example, if an organization is managing a messaging broker
today, it can easily replace it with the fully managed Amazon MQ service without rewriting
or paying for third-party software licenses. Or, if an organization is migrating a Windows- Create and deploy 300+
based application that requires file storage, it can use the fully managed Amazon FSx for containerized applications
Windows File Server. To reduce the amount of time spent managing Kubernetes clusters,
software companies can move to a managed Kubernetes service like Amazon EKS.
Build machine learning (ML)
infrastructure on Amazon EKS
When an organization is ready to move existing applications straight to containers, the with Kubeflow
team can streamline the process through AWS App2Container (A2C). A2C is a command-
line tool for modernizing .NET and Java applications into containerized applications.
It analyzes and builds an inventory of all applications running on virtual machines, on
premises, or in the cloud and packages the application artifact and identified dependencies
into containers.

“We now have unprecedented high availability across the

globe, while reducing the average time to bring a change
to the stack from four weeks to a matter of hours.”

Jean-Marie Ferdegue, Director, Platform Engineering, Babylon Health

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Why should I choose AWS
to help me with migration
and modernization?
With millions of active customers and a global cloud presence since
2006, AWS has the most experience helping software companies of all
ages, industries, and geographies benefit from the cloud.

Our software, services, support, and partner ecosystem can help

organizations optimize results and provide them with prescriptive
guidance throughout every phase of their cloud migration and
modernization journey. As software organizations resize their apps,
migrate to the cloud, and modernize, AWS can help meet operational
goals. We offer robust training and certifications to upskill teams and
improve efficiency.

Following the guidance in this eBook will enable software companies

to maximize the benefits of the cloud with urgency, purpose, and
foresight. The end result: business transformation that helps free up IT
resources for projects and tasks that add real value, reach milestones
and benchmarks faster, and create an ever-stronger migration/
modernization business case that reinforces the buy-in, enthusiasm,
and commitment of everyone in an organization.

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Additional resources
MODERN APPLICATIONS OVERVIEW SEE WHAT WE OFFER GROWING SOFTWARE COMPANIES
Build Modern Applications on AWS › AWS for Software Companies ›

MODERNIZATION ASSESSMENT GET STARTED ON YOUR MIGRATION JOURNEY

Modern Applications Fluency Assessment › Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) ›

EXECUTIVE SUPPORT
AWS Executive Insights ›

RE-SKILLING STAFF
AWS Migration Training ›

BUILDING AND OPERATING SOFTWARE

The Amazon Builders’ Library ›

If you have any questions or want to talk to an expert, contact

AWS Sales ›

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