The Urgency of Accelerating Cloud Migration — Observations from AWS re:Invent 2022

I was back to Vegas for the first time since the pandemic thanks to the AWS re:Invent event. The huge and enthusiastic crowd from all over the world created a strong sense of life being back to normal. AWS did a remarkable job making this conference a success. Both keynote and breakout sessions were well attended. Apparently, AWS’ vision and execution of their cloud strategy has won them passionate followers.

One of the themes at the conference is cloud migration, or the urgency of accelerating cloud migration.

The benefits of migration to cloud are well documented—cost reduction (elastic provisioning), agility and faster innovation (faster feature releases and faster adoption of AI/ML), and resiliency (minimizing brittle apps). However, not all migration projects are moving at the desired pace. According to AWS, the cost of migrating slowly includes slower deployments, over provisioning, slower innovation, and higher risk of outage.

A comprehensive and accurate migration readiness assessment (MRA) is a critical roadblock in the migration process. A thorough understanding of the legacy environment’s data assets from which an enterprise customer plans to migrate is a crucial prerequisite to the success of the migration project.

Here is where Orion’s Enterprise Information Intelligence Graph (EIIG) can complement AWS Cloud Migration Services and AWS migration services partners’ MRA offerings to accelerate the readiness assessment and eventually the entire migration process.

Orion Governance is an AWS ISV partner and EIIG is an AWS Marketplace offering. Specifically, EIIG helps MRA in the following ways:

• Broad technology support: EIIG is able to automatically ingest metadata from very complex technological sources, not just the common DBMSs but also legacy systems such as the mainframe and AS/400, ETL tools, BI reports, and programming languages such as COBOL, PL/1, JCL, RPG, Python, and Javascripts. It weaves this metadata into a knowledge graph and offers a full inventory of their data assets including code and reports within hours to make sure every report, dashboard, metric, dimension is accounted for, the source tables identified, and the transformation logic documented.
• Identifying reusable data and setting up migration priorities: Empowered by AI/ML, EIIG helps determine which data assets can be reused in the new environment and set up migration priorities and approaches according to the popularity, criticality, sensitivity, and relevance to regulatory compliance.
• Solving the data bloat problem: Automatically detect data assets with no use to business and redundant data assets such as duplicate reports, code, and tables to decide what workload to move, retain, or retire and thus dramatically reduce the scope and efficiency of the migration.
• Impact analysis and change management: With EIIG, customers can understand the impacts of any change within minutes. It can provide snapshot versions of the data landscape between iterations, enabling running comparisons and doing impact analysis for root cause analysis.

We are looking forward to working with AWS and its migration services partners to help speed their customers’ journey to cloud. Please click here for an EIIG demo.

About the author: Niu Bai, Ph.D. is the Head of Global Business Development and Partnerships at Orion Governance, Inc.