The advantage of moving to AWS cloud—6 reasons to migrate

Cloud computing is getting more buzz than ever, and for a good reason—it enables businesses to scale without constraints while providing unmatched security and performance. With Amazon Web Services (AWS) leading the cloud game, you may be wondering what exactly the advantage of moving to AWS cloud is and how you can benefit from it.

In this guide, we’ll answer your questions by discussing six important benefits of migrating to AWS. We’ll also highlight AWS cloud migration best practices to ensure a smooth transition and make the most of everything the platform has to offer. Plus, we’ll show you how to use Miro, a powerful Innovation Workspace, to manage and fine-tune your AWS infrastructure after the migration.

6 benefits of moving to AWS cloud

AWS is more than a cloud platform—it’s an entire ecosystem of products and features that cater to businesses of all sizes and industries. Here are some of the key benefits you’ll get by joining the AWS universe:

Reduced costs

If you’re running on-premises data centers, you know how expensive they can be. You need to invest in physical infrastructure even before you’re absolutely sure you’ll use it, which often means you’ll pay for something you don’t really need.

By migrating from traditional hardware and hosting environments to AWS, you’ll be able to take advantage of the pay-as-you-go pricing model. This means you won’t pay for your infrastructure upfront—instead, you’ll only pay for the resources you actually use.

Besides the pay-as-you-go model, AWS offers even more cost-saving opportunities, including:

• Reserved Instances: If you have predictable workloads, you can make a long-term commitment to using a specific AWS service, such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). This way, you can save a substantial amount of money in the long run. For example, you can save up to 72% with Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances compared to on-demand pricing.

• Spot Instances: Spot Instances are available for Amazon EC2. They let you take advantage of unused EC2 capacity at a discounted price, typically up to 90% lower than on-demand prices. You can use these instances for different fault-tolerant, stateless, or flexible apps. For example, you can deploy containers or run big data or machine learning workloads.

• Savings Plans: Savings Plans are flexible pricing models that let you get lower prices if you commit to a specific usage (measured in $/hour) for a certain period (one or three years). There are three types of Savings Plans covering AWS services such as EC2, SageMaker, Lambda, and Fargate.

Various online reports confirm the enormous cost savings you’ll be able to achieve if you migrate to AWS. One published by the Enterprise Strategy Group shows that you can reduce compute, networking, and storage costs by a whopping 66% if you move your on-premises infrastructure to AWS.

Increased security

Security in the cloud is one of the key concerns for everyone considering moving to AWS—after all, you’d be leaving all your data in the cloud provider’s hands. Fortunately, there’s no reason to worry, as AWS is architected as the world’s most secure global cloud infrastructure.

The AWS cloud supports a shared responsibility model—it deals with the security of the cloud, while you (the customer) handle security in the cloud. Here are only some of the options that make AWS highly secure:

1. Continuous infrastructure monitoring: AWS keeps a watchful eye on its infrastructure to identify potential threats and maximize security.

2. Data encryption: With AWS, you can encrypt your data at rest (the data that’s not being transferred from one place to another) and in transit (the data that’s actively moving).

3. Robust identity and access management: You can configure who can do what in your cloud setup to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches.

4. Data backup: You can centralize and automate data backups across AWS services to protect your info. Customize data backup plans and policies and set up rules that align with your organization’s needs.

5. Activity logging: AWS lets you continuously monitor and log account activity to analyze your security, track resource changes, or simplify troubleshooting.

Here are some of the AWS services you can use to customize your security settings and keep your infrastructure safe at all times:

AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM) : It lets you manage access to your AWS resources by customizing permissions and identities for every user. Amazon GuardDuty : It enables you to protect your data, workloads, and accounts through intelligent threat protection powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Amazon Inspector: It automatically discovers workloads (like EC2 instances or containers) and checks them for software vulnerabilities and accidental network exposures. Amazon CloudWatch: It monitors resources and apps on AWS, on-premises, and on other clouds, reacts to performance changes, and optimizes resource use while offering detailed insight into your system’s performance. AWS Shield: It offers protection against denial-of-service (DoS) attacks (malicious attempts to overload a website or network, making it unavailable to end users).

Improved flexibility

Whether you want to host websites, deploy apps, or do some large-scale data processing, AWS has the tools and features to support you. With over 200 services in its arsenal, AWS covers every scenario and use case you can imagine. This abundance allows you to choose a preferred operating system, programming language, database, web application platform, and every other element you need to build a system that aligns with your requirements.

Think of AWS as a giant LEGO set—you get all the pieces and building blocks you could possibly need, and you can put them together however you want. The flexibility you get with AWS makes building new solutions a breeze, but it’s just as great for your existing apps. Since it doesn’t limit you to a particular operating system or programming language, AWS can be a perfect new home for your apps.

Access to innovations

Another advantage of moving to AWS cloud is that you’ll get access to the latest cutting-edge technology.

AWS is known as one of the industry’s biggest innovators. In addition to being the first commercial cloud provider on the planet (launched in 2006), AWS is dedicated to pushing the industry’s boundaries through constant advancements.

For example, AWS pioneered serverless computing in 2014 when it introduced AWS Lambda, a service that allowed developers to run code without provisioning or managing servers. AWS also made a breakthrough with Amazon SageMaker, a service that enabled developers and scientists to take advantage of machine learning without previous experience.

At AWS re:Invent 2024, a learning conference AWS hosts for the global cloud computing community, the company introduced several new products and features, including:

• Amazon Nova: A family of new foundation models that deliver frontier intelligence and revolutionary price performance. With different models, you can quickly process image, video, and text inputs and generate images and videos.

• Amazon Q: A generative AI-powered assistant that can improve your productivity by solving problems, generating content, and answering questions. Besides helping your business in general, Amazon Q for developers can streamline coding, troubleshoot issues, and perform security checks.

Unparalleled scalability and elasticity

Trends are always changing, and AWS makes it easy to adapt to any new circumstance. Is your business expanding? No need to invest in additional hardware or install extra apps to keep up—AWS offers virtually unlimited capacity to let you grow without limitations. 

The same goes for scaling down. Rather than paying for unused infrastructure, AWS allows you to reduce your resources and pay only for what you actually use. 

To right-size your resources and unlock the full benefit of scalability, you can rely on AWS Auto Scaling. The service monitors your apps and automatically adjusts capacity to guarantee optimal performance at the lowest possible cost. It will help you keep your operations running smoothly even if your workloads are often changing or unpredictable.

Effortless compliance

If you’re working in healthcare or finance, you know how challenging it can be to meet all compliance regulations regarding data residency, privacy, and security. If you decide to move to AWS, compliance will become effortless. The platform supports 143 security standards and compliance certifications, including:

• PCI-DSS: For storing and processing payment account data

• HIPAA/HITECH: For protecting health information

• GDPR: For protecting the personal data of EU citizens

AWS cloud migration best practices

Migrating to AWS can help you take your system to new levels of performance, security, and cost optimization. But, the migration process can be challenging, so here are some general cloud migration best practices you should follow to successfully complete the move:

Assess & plan

The first thing you need to do before starting the migration process is to gain a deep understanding of your current setup. Analyze every part of the infrastructure and assess your workloads and apps to determine whether your organization is ready to operate in the cloud.

When figuring out your readiness, consider the following aspects:

1. Workforce: Do you have enough qualified staff who will oversee and manage the migration process?

2. Communication: Do you have strong internal communication policies that guarantee everyone involved in the migration process can seamlessly work together?

3. Tools: Do you use content and project management tools that will help you to continuously track progress and document new findings and challenges?

If you estimate your organization is ready, consider the reasons why you want to migrate. Planning cloud migration should involve determining your priorities, whether that’s reducing costs, improving performance, or enjoying more scalability, as these will lead your migration in the right direction.

Explore different migration strategies

There are strategies for moving applications to AWS, and these are known as the 7 Rs:

Retire: For apps you want to archive or decommission. Retain: For apps you want to keep in the original environment or those that you don’t want to move to AWS for now. Rehost: For apps you want to move from their source environment to AWS without making any changes. Relocate: For servers containing one or more apps that you want to transfer from an on-premises platform to a cloud version of the platform. Repurchase: For apps you want to replace with a different version or product to enjoy more value. Replatform: For apps you want to move to the cloud and optimize in some way for more efficient operation. Refactor or re-architect: For apps that you want to move to the cloud and modify their architecture by leveraging cloud-native options.

The AWS Prescriptive Guidance website offers more info on each migration strategy and is a valuable resource you should rely on during your move to the cloud.

Rely on AWS’ migration services

AWS offers plenty of migration services to help you move to the cloud, including:

• AWS Migration Hub: It offers tools for assessing, planning, and completing your migration.

• AWS Application Migration Service: It simplifies and accelerates your migration while making sure your apps don’t experience any downtime while moving to AWS.

• AWS Database Migration Service: It helps you migrate your data from popular commercial and open-source databases.

Visualize your AWS architecture

Creating a diagram of your desired AWS architecture can help you:

• Collaborate with your team more efficiently

• Identify areas that may need your attention to ensure smooth migration

• Align your system with AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices

• Come up with a detailed plan of how you’ll move your existing infrastructure to AWS

• Understand how different components interact with each other

A tool like Miro can help you create detailed AWS cloud architecture diagrams and visualize your entire system.

Represent your AWS architecture with Miro

Miro is an Innovation Workspace with powerful architecture diagramming capabilities to help you visualize every system component and interaction on its infinite canvas. Whether you’re migrating to AWS or are a seasoned user, our features offer everything you need to map out your systems, boost collaboration, and automate aspects of your work for increased productivity.

Some of our most notable AWS diagramming features include: 

• AWS Cloud View app: Miro lets you create AWS infrastructure diagrams by importing data straight from your AWS account.

• Diagram Focus Mode: With features like a curated toolbar and user-friendly options for alignment and distribution updates, you’ll become a diagramming pro in no time. 

• AWS shape pack: Explore a vast library of standardized AWS shapes and icons to illustrate your AWS cloud architecture components. Simply drag and drop the desired shapes across your Miro board to map out or optimize your cloud setup.

• Security and compliance: Keep your AWS architecture secure with features like user access control and normalized audit logs.

• Real-time and async collaboration features: Use options like interactive presentations, live workshops, and async Talktracks to keep your team on the same page throughout the process of designing your cloud architecture. 

• AWS Cost Calculator: Estimate your costs, plan your cloud spend, and spot cost-saving opportunities—directly on your Miro board.

• 13+ AWS diagram templates: Take advantage of our vast collection of ready-made templates for visualizing your cloud architecture, designing scalable solutions, and more. We recommend trying out the AWS Architecture Diagramming Template.

If you’d like to explore Miro in detail and try out our AWS features, sign up for a free Business trial.

If you’re ready to migrate to the AWS cloud, we recommend checking out our cloud migration webinar and whitepaper. These valuable resources will help you overcome common challenges related to migrations, such as inefficiencies and potential security risks.