The Power of Partnership and AWS Cloud Innovation

When migrating to the AWS cloud, many organizations make the initial choice to go it alone. But making system-wide changes across an organization isn't an easy task. From defining goals to upskilling staff to determining which apps to move first, many businesses find they can't migrate as quickly or efficiently as they thought — and that the migration they're conducting isn't maximizing value.

This is where an expert partner can make a difference. Hiring a cloud migration partner not only speeds up the migration process, but it also ensures a solution that doesn't just duplicate your current on-premises efforts in the cloud; it positions your organization for future business scaling and long-term success. That's why an internationally recognized collegiate business school opted into a partnership with the AWS cloud experts at CDW.

In this piece, we'll explore how our team stepped in to help this business school two years after their original launch, and the long- term benefits our partnership brought to their AWS cloud migration process.

When this university business school made the decision to transition to the cloud, there were two main motivators: the desire to maintain and cultivate their brand of excellence and innovation, and the need to free-up valuable real estate space on their campus. Their current on-premises data center was taking up expensive square footage that needed to be used for classrooms. By freeing up that real estate, the business school knew the migration would pay for itself. But beyond their need for more physical space, the school was looking at cloud migration to stay ahead of the technology and business curve.

After about 12 months of internal cloud migration planning, there was still a lot of work to do. Time was ticking on the three-year timeline they had set for themselves, and stakeholders were struggling to accomplish the migration project alongside day-to-day organizational tasks. While creating an AWS focus group to support internal operations, they realized they could use some external support to move the mission along. That's when they brought in CDW and AWS.

Our first task was identifying and addressing gaps in the school’s current migration process.  Using SkyMap, a versatile cloud migration orchestration tool, our team performed a discovery effort, crawling through the school’s systems, identifying redundancies and old or inefficient systems. During this process, we identified owners for each machine across departments and determined which applications were on those machines.

We then examined each system through the lens of the "6Rs" to determine which systems should be retired, transferred or re-visioned entirely in the cloud:

1. Rehosting: The simplest and fastest solution — simply moving your current system into the cloud without any recoding or retooling. This is also called a "lift and shift." It doesn't necessarily improve efficiency or change your network environment.
2. Replatforming: Like rehosting, but with a little boost. It might mean making a minor upgrade in your current system or moving your backend data to a more AWS-friendly platform.
3. Repurchasing: Basically, this is making a switch from one tool to another, more efficient or cloud-friendly version. So, you might move from a data center bound application to an off-the-shelf cloud solution.
4. Refactoring: This option is the most challenging but can lead to amazing results. Refactoring is essentially recoding your entire application to optimize it for the cloud space. When you choose this option, you have to think about ongoing updates, but it can lead to the most effective, designer solutions.
5. Retaining: Retaining is simple — you don't move an app to the cloud. If you make this choice, you must find the right home for it. Maybe in an on-premises data center or another data center nearby.
6. Retiring: When you retire applications or servers, they disappear. You don't need them in your new system, so they can go to a new home.

For this business school, the focus was on addressing operational gaps, retiring orphaned or obsolete servers, and modernizing their back-ups and security tooling. In fact, using SkyMap we discovered that more than 40% of their servers could be retired, saving on migration time and money.

Once we identified gaps in the current system, it was time to focus on developing the proof-of-concept, or POC. This part of migration planning proves the new cloud environment is ready for mass migration.

Typically, migration planning involves applying a weight to each application based on difficulty of migration and how critical it is to the overall functionality of the network. Using these weights,

CDW works with an organization to create a series of ranked criteria, that we then use to divide applications into migration waves. The first wave is a pilot project that tests the cloud environment and helps shape the runbooks, or migration guides, to guide mass migration.

The business school had struggled to complete this process alone because of several organizational roadblocks that added an extra layer of complexity to their project. By partnering with CDW, they were able to work these roadblocks into the material requirements planning (MRP) and develop an efficient migration plan.

The three primary challenges we faced together included:

The migration could not interrupt class time.
This business school has an esteemed reputation with rigorous coursework. For this migration to succeed, it needed to be unobtrusive. If down-time was necessary, it had to be scheduled for the windows when students were not in class.

The business school had to coordinate with the university.
Though the business school operates independently in many ways, it falls under the university administrative umbrella. Because of that, it was necessary to coordinate with the university to make certain networking changes, many of which happened at the time of migration.

It had to be transparent for server owners and application stakeholders. 
The business school is decentralized, which meant tracking down exactly who owned and operated each server was more challenging than it might have been at other organizations. The MRP had to include time to track down and communicate with server and application owners before migration.

After working closely with CDW to rank and identify the ideal applications for their migration pilots, the business school chose five relatively low-risk programs for the first migration wave: five applications on twelve servers that only impacted the school’s computing community, but which tested the success of database, authentication and Active Directory dependencies.

Choosing which apps are right for the migration pilot is important not just in the development of a migration plan, but also to ensure the best education for the organization. During the POC, CDW’s training and education process became the priority. The migration pilot provided a hands-on training environment to support the ongoing education of the school’s IT staff so that they would be empowered to run the system after the migration was over.

The training process included a migration workshop, during which we explained the migration pilot process, and set expectations for the pilot alongside the business school’s staff. The workloads that CDW and the school chose for the pilot were developmental, which meant that the team could afford to take more time tracking the process, making alterations and developing runbooks to use as a template for mass migration. Slowing down during the pilot process allowed the school’s team to learn with our experts by their side, and the collaboratively authored runbooks became a manual for their future migrations.

This period of expertise sharing, training and guidance is what differentiates CDW from other cloud migration experts. But our ad-hoc job training wasn't only an organizational benefit — it also supported the school’s educational mission and brand of excellence.

After the MRP was complete, CDW didn’t just disappear. Hands-on learning continued during the mass migration phase, as our team worked with the school to support troubleshooting and provide-guidance to ensure a top-quality final solution.

In our work with the business school during mass migration, our partnership became about balancing the goal of maintaining uptime during class sessions with completing migration during the designed timeframe. CDW offered flexible support during this complex process, particularly around the migration of a mission-critical legacy system that required higher bandwidth than was available through the current Aviatrix appliance which implemented an Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) tunnel between the business school and AWS. This was one of the most important parts of the migration project, but it was deliberately delayed for months to avoid disrupting class time.

To upgrade that bandwidth, CDW and the school put their heads together to determine when certain systems could be down. Instead of doing that migration over the summer, they chose a two-week period during the December holidays when there were no classes in session. Though this wasn’t the original plan, it was the best possible option for the business school community.

For CDW, an essential part of the troubleshooting and migration process is focusing on the client’s mission. Being a flexible partner means sharing priorities — for the business school, that meant scheduling migration around class time to guarantee that the process didn’t disturb learning. By sharing a client’s priorities, we can help them develop a cloud process that fits their mission. By necessity, this isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. Each organization has different needs and different pain points.

As internationally recognized authorities on business and management, this school knows the value of partnering with an expert. They chose CDW as their AWS cloud migration partner because they needed innovative and agile cloud network experts who would empower them to make innovative forward-thinking decisions for years to come.

As a partner through the entire migration process, our team shared best practices with the business school on AWS cloud design and migration, serving as translator, teacher and guide. The long-term benefits of this shared expertise are immense; today the business school not only operates on the cloud, but they can also speak cloud.

After two slow years of working alone, CDW was able to complete the school’s mass migration in only eight months. With CDW’s help, the school was empowered to move forward with confidence in their cloud environment to continue operating efficiently, long after the project ended. The long-term value of this partnership is rooted in training and education. It’s not just a one-off service, it’s an investment in a new way of thinking.