Today’s competitive environment of enterprise cloud migrations, traditional proposal development methods no longer meet the demanding timelines and accuracy requirements of modern businesses. As solution architects at Tech Mahindra, we worked across multiple RFX proposals using AWS Transform to simplify and speed up our migration proposal process. This blog explores how we adapted our approach when a customer needed a quick, directional business case for their cloud migration journey. The challenge was to deliver fast, actionable insights that would help the customers understand the value proposition of cloud migration within a compressed timeline. This solution helped set new standards for efficiency and precision in cloud migration planning while meeting the urgent needs of our customers’ decision-making process.
Understanding the Cloud Migration Journey
Cloud migration proposals traditionally require analysis of existing infrastructure, technical assessments, and direction for business case development. Our team faced the challenge of responding to an RFP to migrate more than 2,000 servers across three data centers to AWS. The client required directional cost projections, instance-sizing recommendations, licensing strategies, TCO analysis, and migration timelines, all elements that traditionally needed weeks of analysis and multiple team members’ involvement.
Challenges in the Traditional Approach
The conventional proposal development process was often inefficient and risky. Teams spent two to three weeks conducting manual analyses, wrestling with complex spreadsheet calculations, and making numerous assumptions. This approach not only consumed valuable resources but also introduced the risk of human error in calculations. Generic TCO calculators based on industry averages often failed to capture client-specific nuances, making it difficult to build compelling business cases that would resonate with stakeholders.
While tool-based approaches offer significant advantages in streamlining these processes, their successful implementation hinges on effective coordination across the organization's technology landscape. This requires close coordination across multiple IT teams, including application owners, database administrators, security teams, and network specialists, to manage different aspects of the infrastructure. Each group typically maintains its own tools, methodologies, and approval processes, creating a complex web of dependencies that can impact data collection timelines. Additionally, varying security protocols and access restrictions across departments often introduce additional layers of complexity to the assessment phase, making it crucial to establish clear communication channels and data collection protocols from the project's outset.
Implementing AWS Transform
To overcome the challenges of the traditional approach, AWS Transform provides a framework that combines assessment methodologies, proven migration strategies, and business case development capabilities to accelerate the proposal process. It delivers data-driven strategic plans that reflect a thorough understanding of the client's environment and outline practical pathways to effective cloud adoption.
AWS Transform helps in:
AI-Powered Analysis for Infrastructure
I used AWS Transform to generate migration assessments from data collected from on-premises environments. It also helped in estimating the cost of running on-premises servers on AWS.
To automate assessment, we create an AWS Transform job and upload the on-premises server data using an AWS MPA .xlsx or RVTools export file (max 10MB, up to 30,000 servers per assessment). We then specify either a region or a multi-region deployment for the assessment.
Data Analysis and Refinement
It is easy to interact with AWS Transform Assessment using natural language to provide detailed workload characteristics. The process takes a detailed look at multi-availability zone strategies, multi-region architecture options, disaster recovery needs, and compliance requirements, resulting in migration proposals that address resilience needs with technically sound and cost-effective solutions. In our case, AWS Transform Assessment supported the proposal through rightsizing, cost modeling, and migration strategies for each workload. Recommendations provided by AWS Transform include:
- EC2 Instance Mapping AWS Transform Assessment uses AI algorithms to analyze current server configurations and usage patterns, automatically identifying optimal EC2 instance types based on workload characteristics. It maps current on-premises servers to right-sized EC2 instances using performance metrics rather than just specifications, and provides recommendations for specialized instance types such as compute-optimized, memory-optimized, etc.
- Storage Optimization The solution analyzes current storage utilization, access patterns, and performance requirements and recommends appropriate storage services – such as EBS, S3, EFS, and FSx – based on workload requirements. It also identifies opportunities for storage tiering to optimize costs and calculates potential savings from migrating to AWS storage solutions with specific configurations.
- License Mobility Assessment The solution identifies existing software licenses that can be transferred to AWS and analyzes BYOL (Bring Your Own License) opportunities versus AWS license-included options. This provides a cost comparison between license mobility scenarios and new licensing models, along with recommendations for optimizing licenses during migration.
- Reserved Instance Opportunities AWS Transform uses AI-driven forecasting to identify stable workload components suitable for Reserved Instances (RI) and analyzes potential savings across different RI term lengths and payment options. It also identifies workload patterns that could benefit from savings plans and provides optimization recommendations for commitment-based discount opportunities.
Developing a Data-Driven Business Case
AWS Transform helped us create the business case within days by automating 80% of the calculations. The business case is based on the current on-premises environment understanding and provides accurate TCO projections. It also identified license mobility opportunities, RI benefits, and storage optimization options. The assessment revealed immediate cost-saving opportunities that meet performance requirements.
The assessment further strengthens the business case through customized RI strategies that analyze workload stability patterns and usage consistency to recommend optimal commitment terms, payment options, and coverage levels that balance upfront investments against long-term savings. All these elements helped in creating a compelling financial narrative that demonstrates both immediate cost reductions and long-term optimization opportunities. The AWS Migration business case created by AWS Transform presents decision-makers with a clear, data-validated economic rationale for cloud migration that addresses both capital expense reduction and operational cost optimization. Automated generation of business cases with both hard and soft benefits helps us in making the migration proposal more persuasive.
Table 1 presents a three-year TCO comparison for different AWS pricing and tenancy options, showing total costs, potential savings versus on-demand pricing, and annual costs. This analysis helps stakeholders understand the financial impact of various licensing and instance strategies, providing comparisons for cost-optimization opportunities.
3-Year TCO Comparison
Pricing Option | 3-Year Total Cost | Savings vs. On -Demand | Annual Cost |
On-Demand (Shared Tenancy) | $730,513.02 | - | $243,504.34 |
1-Year NURI (Shared Tenancy) | $567,361.56 | 22.33% | $189,120.52 |
1-Year NURI (Mixed Tenancy, Windows Server pre-2022 BYOL) | $1,080,290.91 | -47.88% | $360,096.97 |
3-Year NURI (Shared Tenancy) | $478,262.04 | 34.53% | $159,420.68 |
Key Benefits in the RFP Process Observed by TechM
- Using AWS Transform reduces proposal development time by approximately 60%.
- Reduced analysis time from 2-3 weeks to 5 days with 80% automated technical calculations.
- Eliminated manual calculation errors and generated consistent recommendations across workloads.
- Provided data-driven recommendations for rightsizing, BYOL, and optimal RI mix.
- Provided more consistent quality across proposals.
- Freed up team members for proposal narrative development and support more clients simultaneously.
Conclusion
AWS Transform accelerated TechM responses to client migration proposals, enabling teams to deliver higher-quality recommendations in less time. The AWS Transform Assessment delivers comprehensive business case justification through detailed cost breakdowns that illuminate financial implications across multiple dimensions. AWS Transform’s tools help avoid over-provisioning by recommending appropriate instance types based on actual workload requirements. By leveraging AWS Transform, TechM solutions architects now help clients realize the full benefits of the cloud, including increased scalability, cost savings, and enhanced security.
