It has been more than 14 years since AWS first made it possible for customers to run their Windows workloads in the cloud—longer than any other major cloud provider has even existed. Customers continue to trust AWS because of our superior performance, security, reliability, and cost savings.
IT costs and staffing requirements continue to rise due to rapid data growth and demand for a better user experience. So, organizations look at AWS for more cost-effective ways of delivering Windows workloads. A recent IDC study shows that organizations will lower their cost of running Windows workloads by 56% over five years when they migrate to AWS. Customers not only reduce their infrastructure and operational costs, but also minimize the economic impact related to unplanned outages. IDC also projects that customers will realize an average return on investment (ROI) of 442% over five years. But migration of Windows workloads to AWS brings more than just cost savings—it helps create an environment that lets you drive better business outcomes. When you reduce the operational burden on IT, you are able to focus on driving more strategic and forward-looking initiatives that help you drive value for your customers.
All the ways you save when you run Windows on AWS
Lower your cost of infrastructure
Customers often struggle with high cost of buying and maintaining hardware, and inefficiencies resulting from uneconomical use of IT capacity and licensing. With AWS, organizations can eliminate upfront capital expenditure by moving to an opex cost model so that organizations no longer have to over-provision for the end state, allowing for more targeted use of compute, storage, and database capacity.
Simplify your IT operations
Organizations often spend a lot of time and money to manage complex IT operations. AWS offers a comprehensive set of management services to simplify configuration, monitoring, and development. With AWS, you can streamline operations in many ways. For example, you can streamline storage when you use secure storage options from AWS, including block, file, and object storage. You can leverage Microsoft Active Directory integration with AWS for identity federation and directory management.
Upgrade your agility
With AWS, organizations can predictably scale up or down in an instant so that you don’t have to spend cycles completing complex and costly deployment. This means organizations can enable faster development, and roll out new capabilities quickly and easily.
Begin your Cloud Journey
Migrate
AWS helps you with every stage of your migration journey, from pre-migration assessment to the migration of your Windows servers to post migration optimization. Take advantage of our tools, programs, professional services, and partner solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to migrate their Windows server workloads to AWS in an easy and cost-effective way.
Optimize
AWS offers a set of unique cost optimization strategies that help you continuously optimize your TCO and licensing, even after you complete your migration. You can use EC2 instances optimized for your workloads, leverage discounted instances such as EC2 Spot, bring your existing licenses to AWS, and save even more when you take advantage of our discounting offers.
Modernize
Innovation happens first on Linux. Containers, CI/CD tools, databases are now almost always Linux first. Customers are modernizing their Windows applications by moving them to Linux, which leads to even more cost reductions. You no longer need to pay for expensive licensing when you migrate to Linux, while gaining additional efficiency and scalability. Read more about customers that have modernized with AWS.
Microsoft Workload Competency Partners
To accelerate your journey to AWS you may choose a partner from the AWS Partner Network (APN). AWS offers various technical programs for APN partners to help them specialize in Microsoft workloads. The Microsoft Workloads Competency Program includes APN consulting partners specializing in specific Microsoft workloads: 1) Productivity Solutions such as Exchange, SharePoint, and End User Computing 2) Database Solutions related to SQL Server migration and optimization 3) Application Modernization offering services for modernizing .NET applications to reduce cost and take advantage of serverless and container benefits. The Competency also includes APN technology partners offering tools and technologies that assist with pre-migration and migration of Microsoft Workloads to AWS as well as operational optimization and expanding workloads with analytics and machine learning on AWS.
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