Developing a business case for moving to AWS cloud in financial institutions. What steps to consider?

What steps to take into consideration when building a solid business case for AWS cloud migration? How to prove to your stakeholders that the benefit will outweigh initial costs in a financial industry that primarily focuses on numbers?Based on years of experience, Tameshi has defined 4 to-the-point steps you need to take to develop a business case that will help you achieve your goals and address:

• purpose of the project

• its rationale

• investment decision

• reasons for choosing particular solutions

• costs

• operating budget

• financial strategy

• business benefits

• how the project will be executed and what it takes for it to work

So, what are the areas you need to analyze that will help you produce a winning business case for a financial institution?

What does your company really need?

When you consider moving to the cloud, chances are that your company needs innovation boost, agility and modernized infrastructure or implementing a pay-as-you-go financing model - all benefits that you can get with AWS cloud. While defining your company’s needs, don’t hesitate to address your current challenges and weak points. It is the detailed and in-depth analysis that makes it possible not only to define current difficulties, but also to brace for future scenarios. Both probable and purely hypothetical ones.

What is your current situation?

If you’re seeking alternative solutions you are clearly not satisfied with your current ones. You are then among over 40% of companies which named moving from on premise software to SaaS one of the biggest cloud initiatives of 2022 ¹. Why do companies decide to move to the cloud? There’s a number of reasons, some of which may sound familiar:

• in case of financial institutions, they want to be automatically compliant with the ever-changing regulatory framework (thanks to predetermined system updates),

• they want to scale up or resize server resources, bandwidth and internet usage,

• they want to have more transparent data insights and analytics,

• they need better data recovery,

• finally, they want to be consistent with their ESG obligations and choose more environmentally friendly solutions.

Companies do it also for cost-saving purposes, as they may simply pay too much for local infrastructure maintenance or reduce financing when cloud servers are scaled or shut down when the usage is low. In any case, servers are fully managed by cloud partners. As a result, moving to the cloud requires minimum technical expertise from your side.

What solutions and tools are at your disposal?

Research the market carefully and choose wisely as there are a number of solutions that may sound and look tempting. Consider overall costs, how this change may impact your organization’s daily operations in the short and long run. Also ask yourself if the transition won’t jeopardize your data security and if your cloud partner has a sound migration plan in place. All these points are addressed by AWS Migration Readiness Assessment tool - a structured document that will help your company anticipate risks, cost, necessary processes, potential migration paths, and post-migration benefits.

And finally - support your business case with facts

With strong arguments and knowledge gained at earlier stages, it is easier to create an implementation plan. Don’t forget about defining milestones which will make it easier to evaluate the implemented project at different stages. But first and foremost, support your argument with facts that will prove benefits the solution may bring to your company. When considering migration your resources to the AWS cloud, don’t forget to point out what experts from from IDC and Nucleus Research came up with

• 31% average infrastructure cost savings 

• 62% more efficient infrastructure management 

• 3x more features delivered per year 

• 69% reduction in unplanned downtime 

• 43% fewer security incidents per year 
   

My business case got accepted - how to safely migrate to the AWS cloud?

When it comes to moving your data to the cloud, your AWS cloud provider can support you in a number of ways. Take the 7s strategy which specifically defines and distinguishes 7 different modes of migrating your valuable data to a new cloud environment. What exactly do these Rs stand for?

• Retire - for companies that can decommission some of their on-premise apps and move to the cloud without them

• Retain - for companies that need to keep a few applications on local servers, e.g. for technological reasons as not all apps can be moved to the cloud

• Relocate - for companies that want to move their data to the cloud without purchasing new hardware (specifically for VMCloud on AWS)

• Rehost - for companies that need to move to the cloud as soon as possible; this scenario can be supported by AWS Server Migration Service (SMS)

• Repurchase - for companies that want to move their solution to an upgraded version, as in moving an on-premise version to a newly-developed cloud one

• Replatform - for companies moving their on-premise databases to database-as-a-service offering such as AWS

• Refactor - for companies that wish to scale and improve their performance at the same time

With such comprehensive support, your business case will surely prove your point!