Windows on AWS – It’s all in the savings

Customers always cite that they end up spending too much money on infrastructure and operations, when they should be using it to fuel strategic business growth. Further, these critical applications are frequently accessed by a large number of users, across various business domains, and therefore must be consistently available. Customers turn to cloud to help alleviate these challenges and customers put their trust in AWS to help them reduce costs for their Windows workloads to help fuel innovation in their business.

In my work at AWS, I help customers with migrating and modernizing some of their biggest and most critical application areas, including Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server. In my conversations, engineers want to have a real impact on how a company runs and how it makes decisions. IT wants to be a real partner in helping run and drive the business. Builders play an important role in the future of companies, and we want to continue to empower these cloud enabled engineering teams to take on strategic value added IT and business initiatives.

Based on a new study, IDC found that organizations running their Windows workloads on AWS are able to lower the five-year cost of operations by 56%, helping them to invest these resources to accelerate time to value and innovation. After customers migrate to cloud, they can also optimize their Windows environments and gain operational efficiencies that helps them drive business growth. On average, TSO logic, a recent AWS acquisition, has helped customers optimize their Windows workloads to show a cost decline of 36 percent. And that’s not all. These businesses also benefit from the agility and efficiency that AWS brings.

For example, I love the story of ZocDoc, a NYC based online healthcare scheduling service that is integrating information about medical practices and doctors' individual schedules in a central location. They started their journey at the first step of the patient doctor experience – booking appointments. Without ZocDoc, it was taking an average of 24 days to book an appointment. At the same time, 30% of a doctor’s time were not utilized because of rescheduling, cancellations.

 ZocDoc does for healthcare what KAYAK – does for travel, OpenTable does for restaurant reservations and Hotels.com does for booking hotels. And the results are impressive. The typical patient can now see a doctor in 24 hours vs 24 days! And I am so proud to say that AWS was fortunate enough to be part of this transformation.

 ZocDoc’s technology stack was an on-premises .NET on Windows platform. With increasing critical mass – they turned attention to larger health care systems. In 12 months, ZocDoc moved their platform from on premises to the AWS cloud. And this is with a team that previously had no experience with cloud.  ZocDoc leveraged a broad swath of technology to modernize including containers. They had a .net monolithic application that had to be reimagined, which they modernized to a container-based, microservices model. They standardized on SCALA, Node.js and c#. They also modernized onto Linux containers. As a result, their engineering team improved their productivity by 3x. By migrating and modernizing, ZocDoc shifted focus from infrastructure to engineering, enabling the team to innovate faster and drive business results.

Here is another excellent example of how running Windows on AWS plays a crucial role in lowering the total cost of ownership by improving developer productivity and allowing engineering teams to iterate on their code rapidly than ever. After successfully leveraging AWS to increase its global outreach by launching Salesforce in AWS Sydney and Canada regions, Salesforce wanted to identify opportunities to improve developer productivity using AWS Cloud. With this goal in mind, Salesforce started migrating a small footprint of its CI/CD environments on AWS that heavily rely on Windows ecosystem to offer feedback on code changes. I’m happy to share - as of today, Salesforce leverages roughly 10,000 Windows instances within its build & test environments on AWS to offer consistent, quality and fast feedback on changes introduced by Salesforce engineering teams.

There are so many other customers like ZocDoc and Salesforce that have grown their business exponentially by trusting AWS as the platform for their critical applications. IDC recently interviewed organizations running Windows workloads in the AWS cloud and puts the value that customers will achieve by running Windows workloads on AWS at an average of $157,300 per 100 users over five year ($6.59M per organization), by:

• Lowering the cost of infrastructure by moving away from on-premise setups and more efficiently using infrastructure and application licenses
• Enabling IT teams by freeing them up from day-to-day activities, thereby giving IT staff more time to take on strategic value-added IT and business initiatives
• Supporting more effective development activities by delivering much improved IT agility
• Enhancing security and reducing the cost of risk by leveraging security-related functionality and reducing the impact of unplanned outages on operations
• Improving business results and operating more efficiently by better addressing business opportunities and delivering better performing and timely Windows functionality to employees

The bottom line is that moving your Windows workloads to the cloud helps you lower your TCO, allowing your business to be more innovative and to achieve greater business success. Read the full IDC report and let us help “show you the money!”

Come join us at the New York AWS Summit on July 11 or visit our website to learn more. Contact us for an Optimization and Licensing assessment, and stay tuned for the full IDC study coming up end of July! As always, give me your comments so that I can personally help you as well.