Navigating the cloud

In the rapidly evolving tech landscape, Gartner's 2022 strategic trends research highlights that by 2025, cloud-native platforms will be the foundation for more than 95% of new digital initiatives – up from less than 40% in 2021. Meanwhile, many organizations now leverage multiple cloud providers, each of whom will continue to innovate with new services. And importantly, I&O’s cloud skills must be applied amid less-familiar agile and product-centric ways of working while also navigating new trends, such as hyper automation and composable applications.¹

As enterprises migrate more applications and workloads to the cloud, they typically see a greater return on investment, enhancing agility, innovation, and cost efficiency.

When we think about a successful migration, it starts with technology. From that standpoint, Amazon Web Services (AWS) stands at the forefront as the most comprehensive and widely adopted cloud platform, offering an extensive suite of over 200 fully featured services across global data centers. But the technology is only as good as your ability to put it to work. You need the right tools, skills, expertise, and industry knowledge – and that’s where Virtusa comes in.

Virtusa has developed a strong alliance with AWS to accelerate and guide migrations to the cloud for customers ranging from startups to government agencies. Earlier this year, Aecon Group Inc. selected Virtusa to migrate its current infrastructure, managed services, and workloads, such as its core ERP and integrated applications, from incumbent systems to AWS. Fundamental to Virtusa's digital engineering DNA is the extensive experience and expertise in cloud migrations. As an AWS Partner Network (APN) member, Virtusa has been helping businesses accelerate transformation efforts with AWS globally for the last decade.

As an AWS Migration Competency Partner, Virtusa deploys a proven methodology to drive successful global cloud migrations for Fortune 500 clients. The approach encompasses a Cloud Adoption Framework addressing people, processes, security, and innovation; a holistic Cloud Strategy covering foundation, hybrid cloud, and infrastructure; Cloud Economics ensuring cost efficiencies throughout the cloud journey; and a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) for governance, automation, security, and best practices. This comprehensive methodology underpins Virtusa's success in delivering end-to-end cloud transformations.

Virtusa has harnessed the capabilities of AWS to create a set of best practices designed to expedite and navigate migrations to the cloud. This partnership has resulted in the development of Virtusa's migration accelerators – a sophisticated blend of AWS tools, in-house technologies such as Terraform Studio and Ansible Studio, and dedicated accelerators like Migration Factory and DB Migration Factory.

These migration accelerators serve as a strategic toolkit, enabling organizations to execute seamless migrations to AWS. The inclusion of AWS tools ensures that organizations have access to a diverse array of resources, while Virtusa's proprietary tools and accelerators add a layer of customization and optimization tailored to specific migration requirements. With a comprehensive support structure provided by migration accelerators, Virtusa with AWS encompasses the technical aspects of migration and addresses the broader implications on business operations.

Another client, a foreign exchange provider, needed to overcome challenges with its on-premises data center, high IT spending, and legacy infrastructure. They chose to partner with Virtusa to accelerate its migration to the cloud. Virtusa's end-to-end services included assessment, cloud foundation setup, and application migration to AWS, resulting in improved operational efficiency, reduced infrastructure provisioning time, and minimized overhead costs. The solution enhanced security, scalability, and business agility, meeting regulatory requirements and ensuring high availability through Multi-AZ design. At the same time, DevOps pipelines with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) facilitated faster software delivery.

Virtusa's enterprise cloud migration strategy comprises four pillars:

Providing 24x7 cloud-managed services with self-healing tools and DevSecOps to enhance performance, reduce costs, and facilitate industry-specific migrations in banking, telecom, healthcare, life sciences, hi-tech, and transport. 

1. Gartner Quick Answer: Four Cloud Migration Challenges Infrastructure and Operations Leaders Need to Address. Refreshed 24 November 2022, Published 31 December 2021 - By Analyst: Ross Winser. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved