AWS Public Sector Blog
5 steps for building a VMware transition strategy for public sector customers
This is a guest post by Tim Keating, principal architect of cloud native services for CDW Digital Velocity, and Taylor Lewick, senior solutions architect at CDW.
Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware in 2023 has changed the virtualization game plan for VMware customers. As licensing structures evolve, many public sector organizations are finding it challenging to maintain VMware environments that align with their budgetary constraints. With the clock ticking on expiring VMware licenses, organizations are seeking alternatives—like migrating workloads to a cloud service provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).
While any change can feel disruptive, this situation presents an opportunity to future-proof operations and even save costs while taking advantage of the scalability, resilience, and opportunities for innovation that AWS offers.
In this post, we share advice for public sector agencies exploring a VMware exit strategy. CDW, an AWS Premier Partner with 17 AWS Competencies across its business, has nearly 30 years of experience configuring and managing personalized VMware environments for our customers. At the same time, our Digital Velocity team has helped hundreds of customers migrate and modernize in the cloud, using our deep bench of public sector and cloud expertise to support a smooth transition.
Drawing from this combined expertise, we’ve outlined five steps to help your organization navigate this shift successfully and set your team up for success:
- Map out your dependencies
- Build a cloud governance strategy
- Scrutinize all associated costs
- Explore an iterative modernization strategy
- Train and certify your staff for the cloud
Read on to learn more about these success-oriented steps.
Map out your dependencies
Before you can migrate a workload, you first need to map all your business and technical dependencies to fully understand how your technical infrastructure and business processes interact. Understanding ahead of time how your organization uses its applications and infrastructure reduces risk and avoids interruptions to business activities during the migration.
Agencies should assign levels of criticality to all applications and understand how and where they interconnect and the costs to maintain them. This kind of full-system assessment can take anywhere from 30 to 120 days, depending on the size and complexity of an organization’s environment—so starting this process early is ideal.
This full-scale assessment period is essential but can be time-consuming. Plus, assessing the environment objectively is important.
Build a cloud governance strategy
It’s tempting to think of cloud migration as simply lifting and shifting on-premises or other workloads directly into a new cloud provider along with your governance strategy. However, cloud migration requires a unique governance strategy because it encompasses different technologies, processes, and roles. IT leaders need to think through and plan out this strategy before the migration because the governance strategy and the migration each require a single-minded focus.
Before starting a migration, CDW recommends establishing a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE): a single group within the company tasked with developing a governance strategy and finalizing migration decisions.
The CCoE is responsible for building the governance and structure necessary to manage the cloud, using the existing teams, tools, and processes necessary to bring the cloud infrastructure under your IT team’s capabilities and controls.
If your organization lacks the in-house resources to organize a CCoE, teaming with experienced cloud experts can help your teams navigate these complex decisions.
Scrutinize all associated costs
To make sure a VMware exit strategy supports an organization’s budgetary needs, agencies should develop a good idea of the costs they might accrue in the cloud before they make the move. Mapping out your organization’s infrastructure and business processes (in step 1) serves an additional purpose beyond avoiding business disruptions. This process also provides a means to gather baseline data so you can forecast what your future cloud costs might look like.
First, understand that comparing on-premises expenses to those associated with cloud computing isn’t a one-to-one comparison; cloud and on-premises workloads rely on two different cost structures. On premises, you pay one time for the hardware every 4-5 years, and you pay once every 1-3 years for VMware licensing. Moving to a cloud service provider such as AWS requires a mindset shift from fixed capital expenditure to dynamic operational expenditure. This is because in the cloud, you only pay for the services you use.
Another value the cloud provides is the ability to trace internal usage among departments and teams. Having a cloud cost allocation strategy gives government agencies the ability to optimize for both internal transparency and costs. Being able to trace usage back to individual teams supports more informed decision-making about how each team decides to use their budget, driving greater efficiencies across the entire organization.
Explore an iterative modernization strategy
The cloud unlocks numerous ways for government organizations to optimize their workloads, but migrating everything at one time isn’t always feasible due to time or budget constraints. In a perfect world, agencies could address all of their operational and infrastructure compatibility challenges as a part of the migration and immediately gain every advantage that the cloud offers. But with a limited window of time to move workloads off VMware, agencies might need to explore an iterative modernization strategy instead.
Rather than fully optimizing up front, iterative modernization allows agencies to migrate workloads to meet deadlines and then slowly enhance them over time. For agencies under a tight deadline to move workloads off VMware, an experienced partner can help significantly expedite this migration process. For example, CDW offers a rapid migration offer, compliant with the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). This program lifts and shifts workloads into the cloud fast and efficiently while supporting strategic modernization over the long term. CDW also has multiple options to help support operational and modernization needs after migration, so agencies can hit the ground running after their migration.
Train and certify your staff for the cloud
Along with changes in the technology and processes, moving to the cloud requires IT teams to update their skills. Communication around this topic is key because you’ll need team buy-in to help support the assessment period and cloud governance efforts. Messaging and team training should happen well before the migration itself.
Agencies have a few options for addressing the skillset issue. First, teams can invest upfront to train and certify their staff to be ready to manage workloads immediately after the migration. Or, a trusted partner can oversee workload management initially after the migration while IT team members scale up training and eventually take over responsibilities as they acquire needed skills.
Clear communication throughout this process is important. Leaders need to be able to deliver a very clear message related to their approach to staff training and the impact it will have—otherwise, they risk potentially losing key talent in the process.
Make the most of a challenging situation
While feeling pressured to make a migration decision can feel stressful, moving your workloads to the cloud transforms operations and enables long-term improvements. Exploring your organization’s migration options early will support a smoother transition that aligns with your organization’s operational and budgetary needs. To aid in that process, AWS has a robust network of vetted service and solution partners in the AWS Partner Network with experience in supporting public sector cloud migrations, from planning to implementation.
To learn more about how CDW supports customers in migrating and modernizing their workloads on AWS, start a conversation with one of our AWS experts.