IBM’s genAI-accelerated blueprint for AWS cloud migration | CIO

The generative AI-powered solution delivers operational efficiencies and helps enterprises retool for future growth.

Enterprises are aiming to optimize and modernize infrastructure via the cloud, but growing complexity and costs keep many migration plans in check. IBM, in close partnership with AWS, has developed a generative AI-powered solution that accelerates and automates cloud migration at scale, delivering operational efficiencies and helping enterprises retool for future growth.

Cloud migration continues at pace as companies look to capitalize on scalability, agility, cost, and increased security advantages. IDC projects that 50% of all IT workloads, worldwide, will pivot to cloud in the next year. Migrating and modernizing on AWS cloud offers an array of savings and improvements. Among them:

• 31% average infrastructure cost savings^[1]
• 62% more efficient infrastructure management^[2]
• 3x more features delivered per year^[3]
• 69% reduction in unplanned downtime^[4]
• 43% fewer security incidents annually^[5]

But several hurdles are impeding companies’ cloud migration and modernization plans. Existing licensing costs, lack of skilled expertise in AWS services, and limited resources and budgets are hampering efforts to accelerate the cloud journey. Many companies need assistance to capitalize on the advantages of cloud and AWS native services in a timely and productive manner.

“Generative AI is revolutionizing cloud modernization by automating tasks, accelerating insights, and optimizing costs,” says Vikas Ganoorkar, Global Cloud Migration Offering Leader, IBM Consulting. “IBM Consulting, with its deep expertise and asset-first modernization strategy, is the ideal partner to guide clients through this transformation and help them rethink the traditional approach. Our proven track record in hybrid cloud and AI and our extensive partner ecosystem best position us to drive successful outcomes for our clients’ cloud modernization journey.”

IBM’s AI-powered AWS migration and modernization factory

Leveraging years of experience and a deep understanding of AWS technologies, IBM Consulting’s AWS migration and modernization factory is an innovative model that delivers a customized approach to migration. Built on the IBM Garage Methodology for app modernization, this squad-based, workstream-centric method leverages GenAI and accelerator tools, pre-built migration patterns, and automation. The goal: plan and execute cloud strategies to achieve rapid transformation at scale.

Cloud-based metrics and KPIs such as uptime, development velocity, price per VM/application, service health, mean time between failures (MTBF), and CSAT/NPS scores serve as guideposts to customize migration and modernization plans, empowering scalability without manual intervention. The approach also helps drive consistent quality and outcomes across multiple migrations.

IBM’s suite of migration tools and assets are built in partnership with AWS using Amazon Bedrock. They include:

• GenAI-powered discovery as a service: Used to extract key data elements from client data repositories to fast-track the application discovery process;
• GenAI-powered migration assist to translate natural language questions to SQL queries to track the migration status of applications and servers;
• GenAI-powered design assistant, which applies models to bring efficiencies to the design phase.

Underpinning everything is the IBM Consulting Delivery Curator (ICDC), also powered by GenAI, which serves as an end-to-end delivery execution orchestration platform. Further, AWS brings capabilities such as AWS Migration Hub and AWS Application Migration Services also help streamline and manage migration by providing additional visibility, tracking, and coordination.

Interpublic Group (IPG), a premier global advertising and marketing firm, turned to IBM and AWS to migrate legacy SAP workloads and applications to AWS Cloud. Using IBM’s Migration Factory and a hybrid-by-design approach, the company successfully migrated two instances of AWS within budget and on time, in just four months. As part of the collaboration, IPG leveraged AWS native tool sets to redesign and rearchitect several key applications, all meeting on-premises performance criteria.

The transition to cloud can be slow and meandering, with complexity and resource challenges hampering migration and modernization. With IBM’s GenAI-infused migration tools and methodologies as a guide, there’s a fast track for the AWS cloud journey.

Accelerate your hybrid cloud and AI journey with IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) with greater speed, scale, and trust.

^{[1]  IDC, Fostering Business and Organizational Transformation to Generate Business Value with Amazon Web Services, February 2018.
[2] IDC, Fostering Business and Organizational Transformation to Generate Business Value with Amazon Web Services, February 2018.
[3] IDC, Fostering Business and Organizational Transformation to Generate Business Value with Amazon Web Services, February 2018.
[4] Nucleus Research, Guidebook: Understanding the Value of Migrating from On-Premises to AWS for Application Security and Performance, 2020.
[5] Nucleus Research, Guidebook: Understanding the Value of Migrating from On-Premises to AWS for Application Security and Performance, 2020.}