Use MAP for Windows to Simplify your Migration to AWS

There’s no question that organizations today are being disrupted in their industry. In a previous blog post, I shared that such disruption often accelerates organizations’ decisions to move to the cloud. When these organizations migrate to the cloud, Windows workloads are often critical to their business and these workloads require a performant, reliable, and secure cloud infrastructure. Customers tell us that reducing risk, building cloud expertise, and lowering costs are important factors when choosing that infrastructure.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for Windows, a comprehensive program that helps you execute large-scale migrations and modernizations of your Windows workloads on AWS. We have millions of customers on AWS, and have spent the last 11 years helping Windows customers successfully move to our cloud. We’ve built a proven methodology, providing you with AWS services, tools, and expertise to help simplify the migration of your Windows workloads to AWS. MAP for Windows provides prescriptive guidance, consulting support from experts, tools, trainings, and service credits to help reduce the risk and cost of migrating to the cloud as you embark on your migration journey.

MAP for Windows also helps you along the pathways to modernize current and legacy versions of Windows Server and SQL Server to cloud native and open source solutions, enabling you to break free from commercial licensing costs. With the strong price-performance of open-source solutions and the proven reliability of AWS, you can innovate quickly while reducing your risk.

With MAP for Windows, you will follow a simple three-step migration process to your migration:

1. Assess Your Readiness: The migration readiness assessment helps you identify gaps along the six dimensions of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework: business, process, people, platform, operations, and security. This assessment helps customers identify capabilities required in the migration. MAP for Windows also includes an Optimization and Licensing Assessment, which provides recommendations on how to optimize your licenses on AWS.
2. Mobilize Your Resources: The mobilize phase helps you build an operational foundation for your migration, with the goal of fixing the capability gaps identified in the assessment phase. The mobilize phase accelerates your migration decisions by providing clear guidance on migration plans that improve the success of your migration.
3. Migrate or Modernize Your Workloads: APN Partners and the AWS ProServe team help customers execute the large-scale migration plan developed during the mobilize phase. MAP for Windows also offers financial incentives to help you offset migration costs such as labor, training, and the expense of sometimes running two environments in parallel.

MAP for Windows includes support from AWS Professional Services and AWS Migration Competency Partners, such as Rackspace, 2^nd Watch, Accenture, Cloudreach, Enimbos Global Services, Onica, and Slalom. Our MAP for Windows partners have successfully demonstrated completion of multiple large-scale migrations to AWS. They have received the APN Migration Competency Partner and the Microsoft Workloads Competency designations.

Learn about what MAP for Windows can do for you on this page. Learn also about the migration experiences of AWS customers. And contact us to discuss your Windows migration or modernization initiatives and apply to MAP for Windows.

About the Author

Fred Wurden is the GM of Enterprise Engineering (Windows, VMware, Red Hat, SAP, benchmarking) working to make AWS the most customer-centric cloud platform on Earth. Prior to AWS, Fred worked at Microsoft for 17 years and held positions, including: EU/DOJ engineering compliance for Windows and Azure, interoperability principles and partner engagements, and open source engineering. He lives with his wife and a few four-legged friends since his kids are all in college now.