Are you paying for resources you don't need?
Modernise your Windows workloads and optimise your licensing costs on AWS.
Contents
- Foreword
- Cost optimisation in the cloud
- Do your bills match your usage? Introducing OLA on AWS
- Benefits of OLA on AWS
- How OLA Works
- Understand your costs today to achieve savings tomorrow
- From optimisation to modernisation
- Cut costs by at least 20%
- About Silicon Overdrive
Foreword
By migrating Windows workloads to the AWS Cloud, organisations across the globe are maximising price-to-performance and reaping the benefits of modernisation.
With a proven strategy for seamless migration and licensing
optimisation, Silicon Overdrive can assist with the migration of your Windows workloads to AWS.
Cost Optimisation in the Cloud
Alongside access to best-in-class technologies, increased scalability and security, cost reduction is a persistent and universal driver behind cloud adoption. The idea of shaking off the steep expenditure that comes with traditional on-premises infrastructures is an attractive proposition for organizations of all sizes, across every industry.
Whether it’s budget-consuming maintenance that’s hurting your bottom line, or the need to pay upfront for more server resources than you need—or having to purchase expensive hardware when you do—costs can accumulate fast. That’s why increasing numbers of companies are looking to the cloud to optimize their finances.
Cloud providers offer several tools and resources to make this process as easy as possible. Take AWS for example; the leading cloud platform offers different pricing models to suit your needs, the ability to match capacity to demand, as well as the ability to identify and correct resource wastage.
However, even with these resources at hand, cost optimization has repeatedly been ranked as the top cloud initiative for businesses for half a decade1. This is in many ways unsurprising, after all, what business doesn’t prioritize cost reduction? It does however speak to the challenges organisations face when attempting to keep costs low and the constant need to discover inventive ways of doing so. One often overlooked area, where money can be saved, is in license optimisation for third-party software.
Do Your Bills Match Your Usage? Introducing OLA on AWS
55% of businesses rank understanding the implications of licensing costs as the biggest software-related challenge in the cloud2. This is why it’s best to evaluate your current cost vs usage before migration begins—you’ll only need to worry about it later if you don’t!
The Optimization and Licensing Assessment (OLA) on AWS, enables businesses to assess and optimise current on-premises and cloud environments, based on actual resource utilisation, third-party licensing, and application dependencies. This allows you to build a migration and licensing strategy to unlock cost savings when you move to AWS.
AWS is uniquely positioned to run Windows workloads that require high availability with 77 Availability Zones worldwide—that’s 2x more than the next largest cloud provider. This combined with additional integrations with advanced analytics and machine learning tools available on the platform, enables you to get more out of your workloads than you could previously. For example, running SQL servers on AWS delivers 40% price-to-performance improvement over competitors.
Benefits of OLA on AWS
Rightsize Your Resources
Build an inventory of your compute resources and determine your actual utilisation requirements to help optimally select the lowest-cost AWS EC2 instance size and type for each workload. Use this data to determine the right blend of on-demand and spot instances, dedicated hosts, savings plans, and other options tailored to your environment.
Reduce Costs
Without optimising your cloud infrastructure, the cost of overprovisioning third-party licensing can exceed the cost of compute. Leverage the recommendations from an OLA to get the most value from your existing licensing entitlements by configuring your instances to require fewer licenses while still maintaining highly performant applications.
Only Pay for What You Need
Use the results of an AWS OLA to avoid unnecessary licensing costs and vendor lock-in. Model different licensing scenarios with license-included or Bring Your Own License (BYOL) instances. Flexible licensing options enable you to drive seasonal workloads and support experimentation, as well as model dedicated environments, so you only pay for what you need.
How OLA Works
Understand Your Costs Today To Achieve Savings Tomorrow
At Silicon Overdrive, we help our customers build the commercial and technical foundations required for a successful and secure cloud-first digital transformation journey. With our services and expertise, you can rightsize, manage, and optimise your IT estate. Our company is built on a history of cloud economics and software asset management expertise, allowing us to typically save our customers at least 20% on IT costs.
Cloud assessments are the foundation of our Cloud Migration Plan in which we evaluate the current state of your applications, infrastructure, and workloads together with business and technology drivers, goals, and challenges. We use the information collected and analysed at this stage to create a full-proof migration plan that will steer you towards your desired cost optimisations objectives.
Silicon Overdrive takes a proven approach underpinned by best practices to help customers adopt cloud technologies. The process quantifies the actual costs and utilisation of current on-premises resources, before identifying optimal future-state AWS placements.
The result? You find the most cost-effective Microsoft licensing strategy to support your planned AWS migration.
From Optimisation to Modernisation
After an OLA, using the information gathered during our assessments, we can also help you:
1. Modernise to services that are manageable and easier to scale and afford more availability or fault-tolerance, for example:
- Migrate VM-based SQL Server databases to RDS SQL Server allowing you to improve performance and load balance read/write load to the database, or easily implement a DR scenario without pre-committed investment in licensing
- Implement autoscaling capabilities for the web or front-end tiers of your applications
- Optimise content distribution to application users
- Virtualise user desktop to a more dynamic workplace
- Virtualise a desktop application to save on user-licensing for applications that are not used concurrently by many users.
2. Replace application backend components with others that don’t require third-party licensing, for example:
- .NET framework to .NET Core migration, allowing you to replace licensed Windows Servers with free-licensing Linux servers
- Rehost MS SQL Servers databases from Windows Servers to Linux servers
3. Refactor application architecture for microservices, allowing you to run on top of containers or using cloud-native serverless services:
- Silicon Overdrive is one of the few partners with a direct line to the AWS technical support team, enabling us to treat our customers with the attention they deserve and help them quickly overcome any technical barriers encountered on their cloud journey.
Cut Costs by at least 20%
Cloud migration is an opportunity to optimise and modernise your enterprise while embracing the opportunities available on the AWS Cloud.
If you’re planning your migration journey but struggling to understand the implications of licensing costs, request a free OLA today and our AWS engineers will help you find the answers you’re looking for.
About Silicon Overdrive
Silicon Overdrive has significant experience helping customers migrate to the cloud, modernising their applications to utilise cloud-native services, securing these workloads, and delivering Managed Services to our customers.
We have been awarded AWS System Integrator Partner of the Year Sub-Saharan Africa 2023, AWS Public Sector Partner of the Year Sub-Saharan Africa 2021, and AWS Consulting Partner of the Year Sub-Saharan Africa 2020.
We are an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, AWS Education Services Competency Partner, AWS Migration Competency Partner, AWS DevOps Competency Partner, AWS Solution Provider Partner, AWS Immersion Day Partner, and AWS Public Sector Partner.
We are also an AWS Well-Architected Partner and an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Microsoft Windows Service Delivery Partner.
We assist customers from various industries including Financial Services, Public Sector, Higher Education, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Media, Non-profit, Retail, and Technology companies.
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