Why Use AWS’ Migration Acceleration (MAP) Program?

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Corrin Jones

POSTED ON

June 22, 2022

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Categories: AWS

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Why Use AWS’ Migration Acceleration (MAP) Program?

What is AWS MAP? The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) is designed to help you quickly and easily migrate your workloads to the AWS in the most cost effective manor.

The AWS MAP Program enables partners, having demonstrated AWS technical expertise,  with processes and tools to accelerate your migration. Further, with MAP, AWS partners can provide you with a dedicated team of AWS experts who will work with you to assess your workloads, determine the best way to migrate them to AWS and provide you with guidance and resources throughout the process.

How Does the AWS MAP Program Work?

The MAP Program is simple. As outlined above, AWS experts will assess your workload, create a migration plan, and help you execute that plan.

Assess Your Workloads

The first step is to have an AWS expert assess your workload, their roles and environment. This assessment will help you understand which workloads are a good fit for the cloud, and how they can be migrated.

Creating a Migration Path

After the assessment, you and your AWS expert will develop a migration plan and schedule. This plan will outline the steps necessary to accurately and successfully migrate your workloads to AWS. Your AWS expert will consider any risks you might have and create remediation strategies that can be implemented in the event that these issues occur.

Executing the Migration

The final step is to execute the migration plan. Your AWS expert will help you move your workloads to AWS.  As part of the migration package, your AWS expert will provide monitoring, support and guidance moving forward.  After the successful migration, your AWS expert will continually review and maintain your cloud environment; recommending cost saving and performance changes.

You will have the support of your team of experts throughout the process of migration, to avoid system disruption or unintended consequences.

The Tools of AWS MAP

In delivering the AWS MAP Program Red River will leverage a wide range of resources to accelerate your migration. These tools include:

  • AWS Migration Readiness Assessment: Readiness assessment is a CAF-aligned process to evaluate your current state of the cloud journey and helps prepare for a larger migration to AWS.
  • AWS Migration Evaluator: This tool enables insights and accelerates decision-making for migration to AWS. It provides visibility into projected cost estimate and savings of running your on-premises workloads in the AWS Cloud.
  • Migration Portfolio Assessment (MPA): This tool helps partners with the process of portfolio analysis to estimate migration costs, create a TCO analysis, and plan a migration
  • AWS Application Discovery Services: This service helps partners plan migration projects by gathering information about your on-premises data centers. It collects and presents configuration, usage, and behavior data from your servers to help you better understand your workloads.
  • AWS Landing Zone: This tool helps set up a secure, multi-account AWS environment based on AWS best practices. Before starting the migrate, the Landing Zone solution helps set-up your initial security baseline for your core accounts and resources.
  • AWS Control Tower: This tool helps setup an automated landing zone, which is a well-architected, multi-account AWS environment. Control Tower can be used to manage your AWS environment during and after the migration. During the application migration process, Control Tower dashboards provide continuous visibility into your AWS environment.
  • AWS Migration Hub: This tool allows you to track the status of your workloads as they are migrated to AWS.
  • AWS Application Migration Service (MGN): AWS MGN keeps your source servers up to date on AWS using continuous, block-level data replication, and in doing so, simplifies and expedites migration from physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure.
  • AWS Service Migration Service (SMS): AWS SMS is an agentless service which makes it easier and faster to migrate virtual-only workloads from on-premises infrastructure or from Microsoft Azure to AWS when you cannot install an agent.
  • AWS Database Migration Service (DMS): AWS DMS can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases

And, of course, expert specialists will be available to guide you along the way. These are just a few of the many tools that are available to you through the migration process. AWS has many more tools available for visibility, management, configuration and maintenance.

The Benefits of AWS Migration Acceleration Program

The AWS MAP program offers a number of benefits to organizations interested in transitioning to AWS. These benefits include:

  • A thorough migration assessment. Get an assessment of your organization’s workload to help build out a strategy for migration that will reduce the amount of time and resources you spend on the cloud.
  • A dedicated team of experts. Organizations only migrate all their workloads once. Many employees have never done it before. You will have a dedicated team of experts who are familiar with the process of migrating workloads to AWS.
  • Guidance and resources. Avoid the unexpected by dealing with experience. You will receive guidance and resources throughout the process of migrating your workload to AWS.
  • Monitoring and support. You will have access to monitoring and support after you have migrated your workloads to AWS, to avoid any potential issues.

The AWS MAP program is a great way to migrate your workloads to AWS quickly and easily, without having to be an AWS expert yourself. It also provides you with the technological infrastructure you will need to support this shift.

The Potential Pitfalls of an AWS Migration without MAP

Without the AWS MAP Program (and the experts within), there are many challenges that could arise with an AWS migration. Here are some of the potential pitfalls you might face:

  • Data loss. One of the most common issues with data migration is data loss. This can occur if data is not properly formatted or if there are compatibility issues between the source and destination systems.
  • System downtime. Another common issue is system downtime. This can happen if the migration process is not properly planned or executed.
  • Security concerns. When migrating to the cloud, security must be taken into consideration. There are a number of security risks that need to be mitigated, such as data leakage and unauthorized access.
  • Costly mistakes. Migrating to AWS can be costly if it is not done correctly. Make sure you have a plan in place to avoid overspending on AWS services.
  • Delays. If you don’t have the internal staff ready to support an AWS migration, it’s easy to continue putting it off.

The above are just a few of the potential pitfalls you might face when migrating to AWS. The best way to avoid these issues is to work with a team of experts who have experience in migrating workloads to AWS.

Is the AWS MAP Program Right for You?

The AWS MAP program is a powerful solution for organizations that want to quickly and easily migrate their workloads to AWS. If you are looking for a way to assess your workloads, create a migration plan and execute that plan with the help of experts, then the AWS MAP program is right for you.

But maybe you don’t even know if AWS is right for you. Want to find out more? You can start your AWS transition by talking to Red River today. The cloud can be complex. We make it simple.