With tougher times looming — know your options with cloud provider funding

One of the main reasons for business enterprises to adopt cloud modernization is to reduce the expenditure associated with their IT infrastructure. Cloud solutions help with faster innovation by offering a consistent development and operations experience and industry-leading tools and guidance. This momentum has continued since businesses planned to increase their cloud adoption in the wake of pandemic. Yet, even as enterprises embrace the many benefits of the cloud, managing the cost of its adoption is an ongoing challenge. Read on to explore how we helped our clients prevent their modernization roadmap to go off the rails.

Cost pressures continue to impact businesses in an environment of extreme inflation, supply chain disruptions, and increasing energy prices. As a result, they are facing heightened costs and need to cut their expenditure. Planned cloud innovation and modernization projects can become targets to kill to realize the saving goal, particularly, if the business case for them is not convincing to the management. It prompts a challenge for the cloud modernization champions to present a compelling case for why the initiatives should be prioritized.

While most executives and budget-holders understand the quality benefits and agility improvements that result from cloud modernization, there is a cost to getting there. Demonstrating a reduction in that cost will help the business case and what if the cost could almost be zero?

The major cloud providers ― AWS, Azure, and GCP, all have funding programs available for certified partners to support clients, using them as the preferred cloud provider. Participating in such a program is not only about monetary support, but also about applying a rigid and proven methodology — to migrate and modernize the service to the cloud with access to the right set of competencies, to reduce risk and secure a successful project completion.

Capgemini is a partner for all major cloud providers. Engaging Capgemini on the cloud modernization initiative is an opportunity ― to secure additional funding for the cloud project, to help the investment approval, and get it over the line on time and at a lower cost. Capgemini will help navigate the process of securing funding by leveraging its cloud provider relationships and partnership. Below are three examples from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) respectively where cloud provider-funded support was used to get the client started on a cloud initiative with very low up-front investment.

Capgemini using the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)

Building a hybrid cloud platform where services can move seamlessly between public cloud and on-premises data center, rest on a Kubernetes container platform and multi-cluster management that can orchestrate deployment and configuration across both cloud and data center. Identify legacy applications that can be modernized using containerization and re-deploy them to the container platform.

In this example, Capgemini offered a six-week project to build out the Elastic Kubernete Service (EKS) in AWS public cloud with the on-premises version (EKS Anywhere), and to integrate this with a GitOps automation setup. On top of the EKS Anywhere build, the project included a containerization assessment of existing applications to identify candidates to migrate and modernize to the container platform. The funding provided via the AWS MAP program was sufficient to cover all implementation effort and the project was offered at zero cost.

Capgemini using the Azure Migration and Modernization Program (AMMP)

As the intensity of the pandemic eased, the urgency to exit the data center became more critical to improving the flexibility and availability to better respond to crises with greater consistency and agility.

Capgemini worked with a client that phased this urgent situation and partnered with Microsoft to enroll in the AMMP, completed the detailed planning process, and engineered and designed a seamless migration. Overall, Capgemini was able to migrate approximately 100 virtual machines running mission-critical workloads without a single problem, in a very short timeframe. Accelerating the transition of workloads from the data center to Azure brought both short- and long-term benefits and was made possible due to Capgemini’s strong partnership with Microsoft.

Capgemini using the Google Cloud Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RAMP)

Establishing a well-designed foundation in the cloud for onboarding workloads is an important starting point in public cloud adoption. This includes the GCP organization node provisioning, setting up the folder hierarchy, establishing networks, subnets, firewalls, and policies following the latest best practices. In addition, setting up appropriate billing accounts, identify and access management, and hybrid cloud network integrations will complete the foundation layer of the cloud landing zone. In this example, Capgemini offered a 10-week project for a client to build a Minimum Viable Landing Zone where 90% of the professional services cost was funded by Google. With a very low up-front investment and support from Capgemini, the client established a cloud foundation on GCP to kickstart and scale-up their cloud adoption.

About the author

Mattias Persson
Chief Technology Officer, Nordic Cloud CoE
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