Experience-Based Acceleration: A post-migration guide to success (Part 2)

Organizations across industries are accelerating their digital transformation and realizing cloud value through AWS Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA), a transformation methodology using hands-on, agile, and immersive engagements. Hundreds of enterprises at various levels of cloud maturity have harnessed EBA to build cloud foundations, migrate at scale, modernize their businesses, and innovate for their customers. They have succeeded because of a proven learn-by-doing working model that seamlessly scales to drive business value, all while following the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we saw that successful cloud migration requires more than just technical tools—it demands a solid foundation of knowledge and infrastructure. We focused on the pre-migration EBA phase and outlined a learning plan using AWS Training and Certification resources to establish a robust cloud foundation, encompassing landing zones, networking, and security. We focused on targeted courses and training material which help organizations build a solid foundation, accelerating the migration process and minimizing potential challenges.

In Part 2, we focus on establishing robust post-migration operations. We explore critical operational capabilities that ensure long-term success in the cloud. We focus on topics like monitoring, observability, security operations and posture management, backups, disaster recovery, cloud financial management (CFM), and operational excellence. Similarly to Part 1, we outline a learning plan using AWS Training resources, highlighting specific learning paths that develop operational expertise. By implementing these operational best practices and investing in team capabilities, organizations can achieve operational excellence, maintain security and compliance, optimize costs, and drive continuous innovation in their AWS environment.

This guide is for cloud architects, IT leaders, and infrastructure teams who have completed EBA migrations. You’ll learn how to establish robust post-migration operations through targeted learning paths. By the end of this post, you’ll have a clear roadmap for operating your environment after a successful EBA migration.

Understanding the Cloud Operations Gap

A robust cloud operations model encompasses five critical pillars that we will cover in this post:

• Monitoring and Observability
• Security Operations and Posture Management
• Backup and Disaster Recovery
• Cloud Financial Management
• Operational Excellence

Building Team Expertise

This blog assumes that the team has established foundational AWS knowledge through successful EBA migrations and hands-on experience with account structure and organization, networking, security, and core AWS services.

We will now examine each operations pillar and the resources available to build expertise in each area. All the AWS Skill Builder courses suggested below are free of charge and do not require an individual or a team subscription.

Before we dive deeper into each pillar, you can take a look at the optional AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate certification, which validates skills and knowledge in monitoring and maintaining AWS workloads, implementing security controls and networking concepts, performing business continuity procedures, and implementing cost and performance optimizations. You can assess your preparedness for the exam with the free AWS Skill Builder course Exam Prep Standard Course: AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate (3 hours).

Monitoring and Observability

AWS observability lets you collect, correlate, aggregate, and analyze telemetry in your network, infrastructure, and applications in the cloud, hybrid, or on-premises environments so you can gain insights into the behavior, performance, and health of your system. These insights help you detect, investigate, and remediate problems faster; and coupled with artificial intelligence and machine learning, proactively react, predict, and prevent problems. Key aspects include:

• Collecting metrics and aggregating logs
• Auditing API calls
• Creating operational dashboards
• Managing alerts

Recommended Learning Path with AWS Skill Builder courses:

• AWS Observability (5 hours)
• Amazon CloudWatch Getting Started (1 hour)
• AWS CloudTrail Getting Started (1 hour)

Optional AWS Workshops for hands-on experience:

• Observability Workshop (6 hours)

Security Operations and Posture Management

Security Operations and Posture Management establishes a strong security foundation that protects your AWS environment while ensuring continuous compliance with security standards. Proactive monitoring, automated threat detection, and rapid response capabilities help you identify risks, mitigate vulnerabilities, and address incidents before they impact operations. This integrated approach ensures business continuity by maintaining the resilience of your critical systems and data. Key aspects include:

• Implementing unified security and compliance monitoring
• Enabling intelligent threat detection and continuous monitoring
• Assessing and evaluating configurations of resources
• Protecting applications from common exploits
• Discovering and protecting sensitive data using machine learning
• Recording and auditing API activity for governance

Recommended Learning Path with AWS Skill Builder courses:

• AWS Security Best Practices: Overview (1.75 hours)
• Getting Started with AWS Security Hub (1 hour)

Optional AWS Workshops for hands-on experience:

• Threat Detection & Response Workshop (10 hours)

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Once you’ve migrated to the cloud, it is important to protect your data and ensure business continuity. The Backup and Recovery Approaches on AWS prescriptive guidance discusses how to implement backup and recovery approaches using AWS services for on-premises, cloud-native, and hybrid architectures. These approaches offer lower costs, higher scalability, and more durability to meet recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and compliance requirements. The Disaster Recovery of Workloads on AWS: Recovery in the Cloud whitepaper covers how to implement disaster recovery for workloads on AWS. Key aspects include:

• Implementing backup strategies
• Designing disaster recovery plans
• Testing recovery procedures
• Managing data lifecycle

Recommended Learning Path with AWS Skill Builder courses:

• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery – A Technical Introduction (2 hours)
• AWS Backup Primer (1h 10min)
• AWS Storage Data Protection Services Getting Started (35 mins)

Optional AWS Workshops for hands-on experience:

• Protect AWS resources with AWS Backup (1 hour)
• Disaster Recovery on AWS (8 hours)

Cloud Financial Management

Cloud Financial Management allows finance, product, technology, and business organizations to manage, optimize, and plan costs as they grow their usage and scale on AWS. The primary goal of CFM is to allow customers to achieve their business outcomes in the most cost-efficient manner and accelerate economic and business value creation while finding the right balance between agility and control. There are four pillars of the CFM framework:

See: To understand your AWS costs and optimize spending, you need to know where those costs are coming from. This requires a deliberate structure for your accounts and resources, helping your finance organization track spending flows and hold teams accountable for their portion of the bottom line. This is why it’s important to have a tagging strategy and cost reporting and monitoring processes.
Save: In the save tenet, we optimize costs with pricing and resource recommendations. Optimizing costs begins with having a well-defined strategy for your new cloud operating model. Ideally, this should start as early as possible in your cloud journey, setting the stage for a cost-conscious culture reinforced by the right processes and behaviors.
Plan: The plan tenet means improving your planning with flexible budgeting and forecasting. Once you’ve established visibility and cost controls, you will likely want to plan and set expectations for spending on cloud projects. AWS gives you the flexibility to build dynamic forecasting and budgeting processes so you can stay informed on whether costs adhere to, or exceed, budgetary limits.

Run: The run tenet is actually managing billing and cost control. You can establish guardrails and set governance to ensure expenses stay in line with budgets.

AWS provides several tools to help you get started. To learn more about how to practice Cloud Financial Management and best practices, visit this whitepaper.

Recommended Learning Path with AWS Skill Builder courses:

• Cloud Financial Management: FinOps fundamentals & strategies, Part 1 (1 hour) and Part 2 (1 hour)
• Cost Optimization Solutions for FinOps, Part 1 (1 hour) and Part 2 (1 hour)
• AWS Billing and Cost Management (20 mins)

Optional AWS Workshops for hands-on experience:

• AWS Well-Architected Cost Optimization Workshop (8 hours)

Operational Excellence

The goal of operational excellence is to get new features and bug fixes into customers’ hands quickly and reliably. Organizations that invest in operational excellence consistently delight customers while building new features, making changes, and dealing with failures. Key aspects include:

• Implementing Infrastructure as Code
• Automating operational tasks
• Managing configuration changes
• Continuous improvement processes

Recommended Learning Path with AWS Skill Builder courses:

• Getting Started with DevOps on AWS (1 hour)
• Getting Started with AWS Systems Manager (1 hour)

Optional AWS Workshops for hands-on experience:

• AWS Well-Architected Operational Excellence Workshop (4 hours)

Practical Implementation Steps to Create a Robust Environment Post Migration

In three steps, you can create a robust environment after the migration EBA.

Step 1: Establish Operational Baseline (2-3 weeks)

• Set up basic monitoring and alerting
• Deploy foundational security controls and monitoring
• Establish security baseline and compliance requirements
• Implement backup solutions
• Configure cost management tools
• Document operational procedures

Step 2: Enhance and Automate (4-6 weeks)

• Develop advanced monitoring
• Configure automated threat detection and response
• Implement security posture assessment tools
• Implement disaster recovery
• Establish cost optimization processes
• Create automation runbooks

Step 3: Optimize and Scale (6-8 weeks)

• Fine-tune monitoring thresholds
• Conduct security assessments and penetration testing
• Implement automated security remediation
• Test DR procedures
• Implement advanced automation
• Optimize resource utilization

Next Steps

1. Register for AWS Skill Builder and begin the recommended courses
2. Implement monitoring, logging, and auditing solutions
3. Implement security operations and incident responses processes
4. Develop and test backup and disaster recovery solutions
5. Establish cloud financial management practices
6. Begin your automation journey

A successful cloud migration is just the beginning of your AWS journey. By investing in operational excellence through monitoring, security operations and posture management, backup and disaster recovery, cloud financial management, and automation, you build a foundation for long-term success. Remember, operational excellence is a journey of continuous improvement. By following these operational best practices and continuously developing your team’s capabilities, you’re well-positioned to maximize the value of your AWS investment and drive innovation for your business.

Ready to enhance your cloud operations? Start your learning journey today on AWS Skill Builder. For personalized guidance on operational excellence, contact your AWS account team.

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