Cloud computing as a key technology trend is growing at an unprecedented pace. According to Gartner, 90% of all organizations will be using cloud services in some form by 2022. Enterprises in recent years are recognizing the importance of migrating to the cloud to evolve their digital strategies and COVID-19 has further accelerated the journey to the cloud for quick and effective digitization.

Corporate data centers, though an integral part of the organization’s overall IT systems in a limited capacity, no longer meet the growth requirements or business strategies of most organizations.

Enterprises are trying to reduce their fixed costs and align their cost structures with changing consumer preferences and business demand in the new age. Most companies therefore prefer to divest non-core assets and adopt an asset light business model for enhanced operational agility.

Consider this: For the IT department, the single largest fixed cost (except licenses) is operating and maintaining the data center (DC) facilities, followed closely by IT assets such as servers, storage, backup devices and network equipment. Together, these costs can account for 40-60% of total cost of operations. Organizations are therefore looking to shift their traditional in-house IT systems and applications to the cloud to leverage a variety of benefits including increased efficiency, enhanced agility and scale and better cost management.

Impediments to exiting legacy data center

Exiting a data center and making changes to large-scale operations is fraught with multiple challenges. A typical data center commitment includes a lock-in period of around 5 to 10 years. This can severely impact the organization’s growth prospects as the digital world increasingly moves to OpEx-based, cloud-only subscription models. Organizations also need to choose between public, private and hybrid cloud strategies based on their requirements and what works for them.

While cloud computing enables speed, agility and easy integration across platforms and devices, the nature and complexity of managing the service depends on various factors.

Some of the most common obstacles involved in exiting corporate data centers include:

• Protecting existing investments and working around contractual obligations on the existing data center 
• Financial constraints limiting CapEx investments in the migration program and the problem of dual costs of maintaining the data center while migrating to the cloud
• Selection of the appropriate cloud strategy and platform after a careful assessment of the existing application portfolio and organizational requirements in the long run
• Risk of data loss during migration
• Security concerns, especially around confidential company, and customer information
• Interruption to mission-critical applications during workload migration, rationalization, and consolidation
• Ensuring architectural best practices when migrating to the cloud for long term stability and agility of the business 

Each cloud management platform comes with its unique strengths and advantages, and integration between platforms and tools can be a complex task.  This is influenced by the size of the organization, the scale of infrastructure deployed, number of sites and machines and OSs installed, the volume of data the firm deals with on a regular basis, software and applications used and the complexity of their processing requirements.

Exiting the DC also requires the mapping, managing and orchestration of all related tools and applications, and new and legacy systems for smooth performance. Integrating existing systems, external enterprise management software, configuration of storage and network resources, integrating data sources and service catalogs all add to the challenge of cloud transformation and management. These factors impact the migration timeframe – complete migration to the cloud could take anywhere from six months to a couple of years, depending on the size and complexity of the organization’s operations.

Seamless migration with Wipro-AWS Data Center Exit Program

Wipro has been at the forefront of the data center exit program, working with multiple enterprises to migrate workloads such as applications, websites, databases, storage, physical or virtual servers, or entire data centers to cloud. AWS and Wipro jointly offer the Data Center Exit Program, which is a cost-neutral, global program that mitigates financial factors related to legacy data center move to help customers achieve their desired migration to the AWS cloud. This program delivers:

Financial benefits

• Assisting in buy back and lease back of DC facilities & IT assets, minimizing penalties by optimizing customer contract terms, and providing credit and investment options to mitigate early termination
• Providing platform credits for decommissioned assets to subsidize migration bubble costs

Qualitative benefits

• Providing flexibility to the business by eliminating the pressure of capacity planning
• Enabling self-service on demand with faster provisioning
• Enabling immediate cash in hand for qualified customers

Operational benefits

• Strategizing an integrated plan for a smooth migration and DC exit for minimized downtime
• Facilitating a holistic approach to application and workload migration for agility and scale 
• Divesting IT assets aligned with the migration plan, thus minimizing dual capacity and reducing costs

Partnering through transformation with Wipro’s E2E DC Exit Framework

Wipro’s DC Exit  framework with BoundaryLess Enterprise enables the development of architecture and assessment support to design organization-specific cloud strategies and boundary less consumption of services. Wipro offers holistic services that cover the complete application lifecycle services in the cloud – from cloud migration to security, DevOps automation to managed services. 

Figure 1: Wipro and AWS DC Exit Program

Figure 1 provides a snapshot of the DC exit program and the various phases of execution.  The program is designed to help customers through the migration process from qualification to run phase for end-to-end program execution. Each of the steps is described below in detail.

Qualification

• Workload discovery and rapid assessment for in-depth insight into forecasted needs and estimate of the migration roadmap and projected future AWS costs
• Complete data center portfolio assessment questionnaire for all owned or co-location (CoLo) data centers
• Understanding of the financial impediments to initiating or accelerating migration (including data center value expectations or CoLo early termination penalties)
• High-level proposal of potential AWS investments and incentives, and projected customer commitment

Assessment

• Physical verification of assets and data centers
• Establishing end to end relationships across users, network, apps and hardware
• Generating detailed and comprehensive hardware footprint report
• DC valuation and assessment
• Evaluating CoLo contracts, identify CoLo penalties and incentives required
• Facilitating conditional offer to the customer and securing approvals

Foundation Engineering

• Designing a comprehensive cloud landing zone integrating all IT components for a complete DC exit
• Providing a single pane of service consumption model across cloud / hybrid IT environment for enhanced user experience
• Creating an automated cloud architecture blueprint based on Infrastructure as Code leveraging AWS Organizations, ALZ, Control Tower and Terraform
• Designing an E2E enterprise grade cloud / hybrid IT operating model including security, ITSM governance, and data protection for organizations

Migrate and Divest

• Defining the move groups and executing as per the R-lanes identified for various workloads
• Performing purchase post lease back due diligence
• Minimizing penalties through adoption of best practices on optimizing customer contract terms, early exit fees and other costs
• Using credits and other investments to mitigate early termination fees and other costs to enable accelerated cloud migration

Run and Manage

• Automating E2E cloud services lifecycle management
• Fast-tracking the transition to a hybrid cloud model for IT service delivery
• Facilitating continuous cost control and optimization
• Leveraging AI/ML to understand past behavioral patterns to provide proactive recommendations and take actions to improve MTTR
• Supporting dynamic business needs with scale and innovation
• Innovate to support dynamic business needs

Powering into the future with AWS

Cloud provides the foundation and the impetus for digital transformation that remains at the top of a CIO’s agenda. It enables agility, flexibility and scale of operations while allowing organizations to embrace new technologies such as computing on the edge, artificial intelligence, machine learning and 5G amongst others. AWS offers an elastic, highly scalable, high-capacity infrastructure platform that evolving businesses and technologies of the future need.

As an APN Premier Consulting Partner, Wipro has the experience and expertise to design, build, deliver and manage new or existing cloud infrastructure. Learn how our Data Center Exit Program can make your migration process seamless with end-to-end program execution.

Reach out to us at marketing.cis@wipro.com for more information.

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