Parsons Saves 35% in Annual Operating Costs and Accelerates Innovation by Migrating to AWS

Parsons Corporation (Parsons), a technology company in the infrastructure and national security markets, was looking to modernize its information technology infrastructure by embracing cloud technologies. The company wanted to improve system availability, reduce operating costs, and accelerate innovation.

Parsons used Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools to analyze its current state, define its target state, and develop a migration readiness plan to help it achieve its business objectives more quickly. The company commissioned an AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment (AWS OLA)—using a data assessment tool called Migration Evaluator—to analyze its hardware and software environment and gain visibility into the cost and resource readiness to build a data-driven business case. As a result, the company identified opportunities to reduce unplanned downtime, optimize ongoing compute costs, and bring technology to market faster by migrating to AWS.

Founded in 1944, Parsons provides engineering services to defense, intelligence, and critical infrastructure customers worldwide. The company first began using AWS in 2015 to increase the availability of its intranet, create a disaster recovery solution, and modernize its website, achieving cost savings. In 2019, Parsons decided to migrate more workloads to AWS to gain cloud benefits, including scalability and flexibility, and to empower employees to focus on innovation instead of infrastructure management and maintenance.

“We chose AWS for its flexible pay-as-you-go model and the ability to scale on demand,” says Jai Kasinathan, director of cloud and productivity applications at Parsons. “Now that we’re using AWS, our team can focus more on developing customer solutions.”

In January 2021, Parsons conducted an AWS OLA, using Migration Evaluator, to discover ways to optimize its existing environment. Migration Evaluator analyzes an organization’s on-premises provisioning and utilization and models the discovered data to project costs on AWS. The AWS OLA then enriches the data to optimize licensing costs.

As part of this analysis, Parsons saw that it could increase system availability and gain the elasticity needed to quickly grow and innovate by migrating to AWS. The company also identified ways to optimize legacy technologies that it was still using, resulting in cost savings.

With its optimization findings from the AWS OLA and Migration Evaluator, Parsons was able to improve its hardware and software environments. It was able to right-size its workloads, improve performance and availability, and reduce costs. For example, in 2020, Parsons migrated most of its Microsoft SQL Server databases to AWS. After analyzing the databases’ utilization, the company realized it could significantly reduce the resources needed to run its applications. By making this change, Parsons reduced its annual operating costs by 35 percent. “Our migration was seamless and simple because of the tools and the intelligence that came from Migration Evaluator and the AWS OLA,” Kasinathan says.

By migrating to AWS, Parsons improved its system availability, kept costs manageable, and gained the ability to develop services in days instead of months, paving the way for continued innovation. “I’m amazed by how quickly AWS develops new solutions and keeps up with enterprise requirements, which helps us continue to grow our business,” says Kasinathan.