A Simple Way for Growing Businesses to Migrate Their Data to the Cloud

It should come as no surprise that cloud adoption is growing year-over-year as customer’s needs continue to evolve. Specifically in Germany, I am noticing automotive, healthcare, fintech, and other companies of all sizes are already benefitting from reduced infrastructure costs and complexity. But this trend is much wider and global in scale.

So why haven’t the vast majority of small and medium-sized businesses attempted to migrate their most important systems to a cloud? Recent surveys show the main barrier to migration remains overwhelmingly due to a shortage and lack of expertise and skilled staff. To remove this barrier, AWS acquired CloudEndure in 2019, an automated cloud-migration service that facilitates, simplifies, and expedites the on-premise to cloud migration process. That’s why we launched the AWS Application Migration Service (MGN) in Europe in 2021.

Select the servers and leave the heavy lifting to MGN

The words “IT migration” are often accompanied by thoughts and fears of exploding budgets, missed deadlines, and frequent system downtime.

That wasn’t the case for Bosa, a Canadian real estate development, which used MGN to migrate their entire legacy on-premises IT infrastructure to AWS in just six weeks, with virtually zero downtime during the migration. Maurice Lui, an IT manager at Bosa said, “There was no performance impact or service disruption during the entire sync process.” As a result, they now benefit from improved scalability, availability and reliability and above all, better security.

Bosa didn’t need to do this alone and had hands-on migration help and support every step of the way with the AWS Partner Network.

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The benefits of a “lift and shift” cloud migration strategy

At AWS, we build our services in a way that allows our customers to focus on innovating and growing their core business. We achieve this in many ways; one of them is by providing services that intelligently and automatically manage the complexity of setting up IT infrastructure in the background, so that you can focus on your core business objectives.

MGN is one of these services and achieves this by leveraging the “lift and shift” migration strategy (also known as rehosting). The goal is to move an entire workload onto an alternative infrastructure with limited changes to an application’s code base. This strategy is described in detail in “Cloud-Native or Lift-and-Shift,” shows the various migration strategies and their use cases.

This is essentially the “plug and play” equivalent of software, but for IT infrastructure and server migrations. The idea is to minimize—and even completely negate—any need for code changes, setup re-configurations, or essentially any other hands-on infrastructure change. You want to replicate the exact same setup, operating system, and experience you have on-premise, but on the cloud. All you have to do is to pick the server you wish to migrate, install the MGN agent and let the automation kick in. Without significant effort, you’ll have your applications running securely on AWS servers.

Get started on your small or medium business cloud migration

The time has come to change our perceptions of IT migrations and the burdens they used to carry. At AWS, we want you to be delighted and excited about your journey to the cloud. We and our partners are here to support you every step of the way. That is why with MGN we want to equip you with services and tools that do the heavy lifting so that you can focus on your business and what matters most to your customers.

Get started with specific tools to help your business migrate your workloads to the cloud.