Unleashing the Power of the Cloud with the AWS Cloud Value Framework (CVF) – Staff productivity (3/7)

Pillar 2: Staff Productivity

Introduction

This blog forms part of a series on the AWS Cloud Value Framework (CVF). The CVF serves as a comprehensive guide to help businesses to evaluate, quantify, and communicate the value of AWS Cloud adoption. It comprises five pillars, with this blog focused on Pillar 2: Staff Productivity.

Figure 1: The AWS Cloud Value Framework

In this blog, we will explain:

• The Staff Productivity pillar
• The benefits that organizations have been able to achieve
• How organizations were able to use AWS to achieve these benefits
• Examples and case studies
• How to demonstrate the value for your own migration

Pillar 2: Staff Productivity

Staff productivity refers to the efficiency and effectiveness of using their time to accomplish tasks. When you migrate to AWS, several tasks are reduced or no longer necessary. By freeing up staff time, they can focus on more strategic, differentiating work, such as developing new applications or improving the customer experience.

The Hackett Group published The Business Value of Migration to Amazon Web Services. The study identified that after moving applications to AWS, organizations were able to achieve the following benefits:

Table 1: Productivity improvements achieved from migrating to AWS. Source: The Hackett Group, The Business Value of Migration to Amazon Web Services 2022

To achieve Staff Productivity benefits, organizations have used some of the following tools, services, and features of AWS:

• Undifferentiated heavy lifting – AWS does the heavy lifting of data centers operations like racking, stacking, cabling and powering servers, storage and networking. It also removes the operational burden of managing operating systems and applications with managed services. This lets you focus your staff on customers and business projects rather than on IT infrastructure. The Hackett Study recommends benefits in agility and cost advantages position organizations to more adeptly compete in the digital business arena. “The Cloud Services Study found that migration to AWS drives new business value in cost savings, staff productivity, resiliency, and agility. The quantifiable impacts prove that cloud is not solely or even primarily a “cost play,” but a strategic advantage over the on-premises infrastructure model. The benefits in agility alone – faster time to market and insight, and more frequent production releases – better position organizations to compete in the digital business arena. The cloud-enabled shift in focus, away from infrastructure administration and application maintenance to new development, is a literal game changer.” For instance, using AWS, Adroll has been able to “focus 95 percent of our staff on new product development”, Valentino Volonghi, CTO.
• Automation – AWS offers several automation tools and services, such as AWS Lambda, AWS Step Functions, and AWS CloudFormation. These tools automate repetitive tasks, freeing up staff time for more strategic work. In addition, automation of the tasks increases their consistency, while also minimizing re-work. GoDaddy has used AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) with CloudFormation to improve developer productivity.
• Scalability – AWS helps businesses to scale their infrastructure up or down based on demand. AWS Auto Scaling monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. This in turn reduces manual intervention in provisioning, forecasting, and managing resources. This leads to increased efficiency and productivity. To scale their infrastructure while not paying for unused resources, Applica has been able to use Auto Scaling in Amazon EC2. Candidates for AWS Auto Scaling include applications or services that experience fluctuating traffic patterns or workload demands. This includes web servers, databases, and other services where the workload varies throughout the day or in response to events.
• Managed Services – AWS Managed Services, handle administrative tasks such as database management, container orchestration, and data storage. This includes Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This reduces the burden on staff and helps them to focus on core business objectives. Research from GLG, The Business Value of Adopting Amazon Web Services (AWS) Managed Databases, supports this benefit. It showed that organizations using Managed Databases saw a “53% reduction in database administration” effort.
• Security, Identity, and Compliance – AWS offers a wide range of security and compliance tools and services. These include, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Service (KMS), and AWS Security Hub. By using these services, you can validate your infrastructure meets industry standards and regulatory requirements, with automating proactive and detective guardrail enforcement. This helps you to continue to minimize your resources time with compliance efforts.
• Global Reach – Today, organizations can add resources in 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic Regions worldwide. AWS announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Taiwan, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. In an on-premises environment, establishing network, data center contracts, compute, storage, and security can take months or years to plan and implement. Using AWS global infrastructure, staff can do this in minutes. S&P Global was “looking at expanding to Singapore. Instead of spending 6–12 months building a data center, we can spin up a new virtual private cloud in five minutes and start providing services to customers in that Region very quickly.” Mark Wang, senior director of the Integration Services Group at S&P Global Ratings.
• DevOps – AWS provides a set of flexible services designed to help companies more rapidly and reliably build and deliver products using AWS and DevOps practices. These services simplify provisioning and managing infrastructure, deploying application code, automating software release processes, and monitoring your application and infrastructure performance. The AWS Developer Tools help you securely store and version your application’s source code and automatically build, test, and deploy your application to AWS or your on-premises environment. Start with AWS CodePipeline to build a continuous integration or continuous delivery workflow that uses AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, and other tools, or use each service separately.
• Generative AI Tools – Amazon Q Developer makes the whole development lifecycle easier. This includes 25% faster initial development, with up to 40% developer productivity increases, and 37% acceptance rate for the code assistance. Amazon Q Developer is a generative AI powered assistant that can help you understand, build, extend, and operate applications on AWS. You can use the Amazon Q Developer in your integrated development environment (IDE), and use code completion chat, and productivity boosting capabilities, powered by Generative AI. Eviden saw developer productivity increase between 20-40% for Cloud Native Application Development, and approximately 20% increase in delivery velocity.

AWS enables staff to focus on innovation and strategic initiatives by handling the heavy lifting of infrastructure management, automation, scalability, security, and compliance.

Demonstrating Business Value

Calculating Staff Productivity benefits with AWS involves considering factors highlighted previously. This includes time saved on infrastructure management, automation of tasks, and enhanced scalability. You can quantify these benefits by measuring time saved, reduction in manual tasks, increased efficiency in deploying resources, and improvements in overall team productivity.

To develop an initial view of the Business Value, we recommend using the Hackett Group benchmark study and applying it to your environment. For example, you can use the virtual machines managed per administrator to estimate how many resources will be needed to manage the environment in AWS.

Then, consider how to use those resources drive new initiatives and projects rather than undifferentiated heavy lifting. Figure 2 shows a visual of demonstrating the benefit of Staff Productivity for Server Administrators. This can be expanded using the same process for other roles supporting your DC environments (storage administrators, DC facilities management, Level 2 / Level 3 support, network engineers).

Table 2: On-premises and AWS Staff Productivity calculation for Server Administrators

* Figures are for illustrative purposes only.

Figure 2: Five Year estimate for Server Administrator hours for on-premises and AWS

Additional Support

For additional support and guidance in demonstrating the Business Value, refer to the Cloud Economics Center. Contact your AWS account representative to request a complimentary Cloud Economics assessment.