The business case for moving 500+ workloads to AWS
A licensing increase and a hardware refresh forced a decision. The cost-benefit analysis made the case for AWS, and a redesigned disaster recovery model cut DR cost by 40%.
- My role
- Built the cost-benefit analysis and migration strategy; architected the DR model.
- Context
- VMware licensing was set to rise by 300%, and the on-premises hardware was approaching a $1.5M refresh.
- Decision
- Migrate 500+ VMware workloads to AWS and replace physical disaster recovery with a cloud-native pilot-light model.
- Results
- $1.5M capital spend avoided
- 300% licensing increase offset
- 40% lower DR infrastructure cost
- Recovery time under 4 hours
The problem
Two costs arrived at once. The virtualization platform’s licensing was about to increase by 300%, and the hardware it ran on was due for a refresh estimated at $1.5M. Renewing both would have locked the company into the same platform for another hardware cycle at a much higher price.
The approach
I treated it as a business decision first and a migration second. The cost-benefit analysis set the cost of staying — new licensing plus new hardware — against the cost of moving more than 500 workloads to AWS, and that comparison is what secured stakeholder approval.
Disaster recovery got the same treatment. A traditional DR site means paying for a second set of infrastructure that mostly sits idle. A pilot-light model keeps only the core components running in AWS and scales the rest up when it’s needed, so you pay for recovery capacity only when you use it.
The result
The migration avoided the $1.5M capital refresh and offset the licensing increase. The pilot-light design reduced physical DR infrastructure cost by 40% while keeping recovery time under four hours.