Improved scalability, reliable security, rapid innovation, and reduced operational costs are some of the growth-driven benefits an organization receives through a SaaS migration strategy to AWS.
These benefits lay the foundation for competitive advantage and long-term growth for the organizations.
To be precise, a thoughtful SaaS migration strategy enables businesses to have a comprehensive roadmap in place when moving their on-premises software applications, workloads, and operational data to a Cloud-hosted SaaS environment managed by a third-party vendor.
In this case, AWS (Amazon Web Services) is the SaaS (Software-As-A-Service) environment. In other words, it’s a very popular cloud computing platform that offers a wide range of on-demand services to a vast array of organizations through pay-as-you-go (PAYG) subscription-based pricing model.
Key Takeaways From This Guide:
- Importance of migrating your SaaS product to AWS
- Right SaaS migration strategy, such as rehost, replatform, refactor, or rebuild, based on your current architecture.
- How to assess your infrastructure readiness and aligning team roles?
- Design a secure, scalable, and tenant-aware SaaS architecture.
- Follow a clear, step-by-step migration roadmap covering data transfer and application deployment.
- Common mistakes to avoid.
- Optimize cloud costs using AWS monitoring and cost-management tools.
- Learn key AWS tools and third-party solutions to streamline each stage of your migration.
Comprehensive discussions regarding SaaS migration to AWS cloud platform will be covered in this write-up, including explaining SaaS, AWS, Data security in AWS, SaaS architecture on cloud, and SaaS migration impact assessment in businesses.
SaaS Migration Meaning: What does it mean by ‘migrating’?
In simple words, SaaS migration means moving a company’s locally-hosted IT operations and software applications to a Cloud platform managed by a third-party Cloud vendor (e.g. AWS).
To capture the essence of SaaS migration strategy definition in a business context, it is a strategic and planned move taken by SaaS Vendors or companies when transitioning their on-premises operational tools, applications, data, and workloads to a cloud-hosted environment.
What Does Actually Get Migrated When Implementing A SaaS Migration Strategy?
What gets migrated is full or partial workloads, applications and related data from a company’s on-premises (locally-hosted) environment to its chosen Cloud vendor’s platform.
The Cloud service provider (the third-party vendor) is responsible for handling every aspect of migration process; from data safety to scalability, flexibility, improved uptime, and better storage capacity, under flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing models.
In B2B SaaS migration, a business just shifts from the traditional approach of managing and hosting IT infrastructures (e.g. software, hardware), and data within the physical confines of its facilities (or on-premises) to a Cloud platform (aka off-premises). And this platform is managed by cloud players, such as AWS, Google, or Microsoft.
Since this write-up talks about AWS Cloud migration, the main cloud vendor we will talk about throughout the writing process is AWS.
Simple Meaning Of Some Notable Terms in SaaS Migration
- On-premises – It refers to a locally-hosted IT infrastructure that a company owns and manages in its own facilities or building.
- Off-premises – It refers to the Internet-hosted IT infrastructure or services managed by a vendor’s remote data centers.
- IT infrastructure – Physical and virtual components within a company’s own facilities that support its IT operations and the delivery of IT services.
- Cloud – An internet-hosted platform consisting of a network of remote servers, providing various computing services and IT resources.
- Cloud Migration – Transition or shifting IT operations, data and workloads from a locally-hosted infrastructure to a Cloud-based platform.
- SaaS Vendor – A service provider (or a company) that builds, hosts and delivers software applications to customers over the internet under a subscription-based pricing model.
- Cloud Vendor – A service provider (or a company) of internet-hosted infrastructures and services (e.g. servers, storage, databases, computer power, etc.) to other businesses, including SaaS companies.
Simplifying The Relation Between Cloud Vendor And SaaS Vendor
AWS is a cloud vendor that offers cloud-hosted infrastructure for businesses.
Slack is an example of a SaaS vendor that offers a readymade software application to customers over the internet, under a subscription-based pricing model. Slack leases or subscribes to AWS to run its app safely, and to cater to its customers profitably.
That’s the core relationship model or business relation between AWS (as a Cloud vendor) and Slack (as a SaaS vendor).
Why Is SaaS Migration A Critical Move For Scaling?
Various attributes accentuate why SaaS migration is a critical move for scaling.
They are easy scalability, seamless deployment of new tools and resources, reducing hardware-related cost to free up capital for your core business expansion, broader accessibility, and faster time to market.
It is crucial for any business that wants to say goodbye to its pressing issue associated with technological and financial bottlenecks when scaling on traditional infrastructure. In today’s considerably tough competitions and reducing scope for staying ahead of the curve under budgetary limits, choosing SaaS migration is an intelligent step for corporate entities.
B2B SaaS Migration Benefits: Why Move SaaS To AWS? How Does It Pave The Growth Potential for Businesses?
When it comes to building a successful B2B SaaS migration strategy, what involves as a key criterion is choosing the right cloud platform. And it must be in conformity with your business requirements, security needs, and operational goals.
In fact, benefits of migrating SaaS to AWS are many, apart from offering some efficient replacement options for your legacy applications. Most companies today make a beeline for cloud migration for SaaS to save operational costs on managing their on-premises IT infrastructures and workloads with upgrades and supports made readily available by their SaaS service providers.
In this context, AWS is a leading provider of cloud-based infrastructures for SaaS businesses, enabling them to save time and focus on their core business functions.
Scalability & Flexibility – How Does SaaS Migration Strategy Help You Scale Your Resources Seamlessly To Any Workload?
Scalability is one of the most critical benefits a business gets by following a SaaS migration strategy to AWS. Wouldn’t you appreciate your SaaS application growing and adapting to user needs and market condition without a hitch? That’s what scalability allows, retaining client and meeting growing market needs.
Traditional or on-premises infrastructures suffer the downside of poor growth, leading to a poor fallout of slow and costly hardware upgrades. When you choose AWS for your SaaS application, the platform can effortlessly handle problems like sudden surges in user traffic on your application.
Moreover, AWS also makes way for a rapid growth in the number of new customers, data volume (i.e. messages, files, transactions), geographical reach, and set of features for your app. It allows you to save your business from incurring large, initial capital expenditures (CapEx) required for building and maintaining on-premises IT infrastructure.
Also, when you migrate your traditional infrastructure to the AWS Cloud, one of its services called Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps your app adapt in real-time by automatically adjusting compute capacity according to the actual demand. As a result of this feature, your app performs undisturbed during peak traffic and reduces costs during low-usage periods.
In addition, AWS allows for your SaaS app seamless scaling through its wide array of services, such as Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, Amazon DocumentDB, Amazon RDS, AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Amazon CloudFront.
Better Cost Optimization – Free Up IT Costs and Optimize Resource Allocation
Managing on-premises IT infrastructure, such as servers, hardware, and data center equipment is a painstaking task. On top of that, ongoing maintenance and IT staff salaries become resource-draining and expensive undertakings for businesses. And the combined costs of these place a huge financial burden on them.
Implementing a thoughtful SaaS migration strategy to AWS, in this context, is a calculated move for businesses. It helps them translate their huge upfront expenses into predictable operational costs. For example, your cloud-migrated software applications or IT infrastructure is routinely maintained and supervised by your chosen cloud vendor. As a result, your business gets the flexibility to free up IT spending. You can optimize resource allocation as and when needed.
Enhanced Reliability & Global Reach – Lower Downtime, More Responsive User Experience
AWS symbolizes its global computing infrastructure with compelling features – scalability, reliability, and security. In addition, the Region of this virtual cloud powerhouse features multiple Availability Zones known as separate data centers built to operate independently.
SaaS migration strategy to AWS, therefore, will give you the freedom to operate your software application across multiple Availability Zones. The result of this setup benefits your application in such a way that if one data center has an issue, others keep your app running smoothly.
As a result, your application has reduced downtime and supporting disaster recovery. AWS also allows you to leverage its global network to host your app closer to users, which essentially reduces latency and provides a faster, more responsive user experience.
Superior Security & Compliance: Trouble-Free Business With Global Compliances
AWS, like its other counterparts, simply wants to stay ahead of the curve. For this, it makes a considerable investment in cutting-edge physical, operational, and software security measures. These are apparently powerful differentiators of the cloud service provider, too commercially viable to be ignored by those businesses lacking such state-of-the-art infrastructural muscles.
Therefore, choosing a SaaS migration strategy to AWS will undoubtedly enable your business to leverage these infrastructural facilities to fuel its growth. Besides, your business will maximize AWS’ comprehensive suite of security tools, and the trust factor it has due to its adherence to various global compliance certifications, including GDPR and HIPAA.
These attributes profile a robust standing for AWS as a trusted cloud destination for companies wanting to build greater trust with their customers through AWS-supported cloud solutions.
Faster Innovation And Agility – Stay Ahead Of The Curve By Bringing New Features To Market
Migrating your on-premises IT infrastructure to AWS means allowing your engineering teams to dedicate more time and resources to building new features, enhancing user experience, and optimizing your core software product. With a successful SaaS migration strategy in place, you can bring new features and products to market faster by integrating cutting-edge AWS technologies into your offerings.
SaaS Migration Strategy To AWS – Pre-Migration Planning
Migrating a SaaS application to AWS is not an easy chore, as it requires a host of different considerations to outcome successful results. From a meticulous planning to having technical expertise and a clear focus on a business goal, you also need to examine the operational aspects of SaaS migration strategies to AWS.
Here’s brief about pre-migration planning.
Assess Readiness – Define Your Initial Goals And Objectives
Before diving into SaaS application migration strategy to AWS, the first and foremost thing to do is assessing your actual needs for it. What problems you face in your existing on-premises IT infrastructures that you want to solve with migration? Are they too slow, too costly to run and be maintained? Are they not secure and scalable enough?
Ask yourself what you will achieve by migrating your software application to a cloud platform. Are you hoping to achieve faster performance, reduced operational costs, and better scalability? Do you seek improved security, global reach, or more innovation?
It will also serve you better if you measure the expected outcome of your planned migration strategy. For example, will it reduce infrastructure and associated operational cost by 20%? Will it decrease the average page load time for critical user-facing page (i.e. home page, product page, checkout, etc.) by 50%?
What about the uptime? Will your prioritized SaaS migration strategy to AWS help you achieve and maintain nearly unfailing uptime for the core application?
Make A Thorough Assessment Of Your Existing SaaS Architecture/Environment
This is self-explanatory. Because failing to analyze your application architecture would mean lacking the sufficient idea of how to set a roadmap and timeline for a successful SaaS migration to AWS. In this context, see how your application is built, its components like database, web servers, application servers, etc.
Check the type of technologies used in the application architecture, like whether it uses Java, Python, MySQL, etc. Assess whether your application depends on third-party APIs or specific operating systems versions. This is essential to understand the corresponding effect of other parts if the one part moves. Audit your application structure to understand if it is monolithic or based on microservices.
Examine the performance metrics of your application to understand its performance capability. This involves analyzing CPU/memory usage, network traffic, response times, and database query times.
You need to right-size your AWS resources by analyzing your application’s extent of CPU, memory, storage, and network bandwidth. To get an idea of storage choices in AWS, you need to analyze available data you have and how fast it is growing.
Assess the kind of compliance standards (e.g. HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS) you would require to meet, and your current network configurations (e.g., IP addresses, firewall rules, VPN connections).
Tools like AWS Application Discovery Service and Migration Hub of AWS can also help you ideate your current environment, in this regard.
Select Your SaaS Migration Strategy – Choose What To Migrate
One of the key things to understand in choosing SaaS migration strategy to AWS is that you don’t have to move everything all at once. Therefore, which SaaS product makes logical choice in migration. Is it application, data, or services? Weigh in your priorities. Then opt for specific approach for each logical component.
Meaning, are you planning to rehost or refactor, or to rebuild? Rehost (lift and shift) is the easiest and fastest, meaning you just copy your current servers and application straight to AWS virtual machines. Though this approach doesn’t let you leverage the full benefits of AWS platform.
Refactor is like introducing some minor changes to your current application so that it can maximize AWS-specific features. Repurchase (Drop and Shop) is another migration strategy to consider in which your app is replaced with a new SaaS solution, though it may risk losing existing customizations in your app.
Design Your AWS Environment (Target Architecture)
The kind of SaaS migration strategy you choose ensures the kind of design your SaaS application will look and work in AWS.
To begin with, set up your VPC (virtual private cloud), subnets, security groups, and network ACLs to create a secure and separate network for your application. Go for suitable EC2 instance types or choose serverless (Lambda) or containers (ECS/EKS) for your application components.
You need to choose suitable database service, consider appropriate storage solutions for block storage, and use Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) to distribute traffic across your application instances. For security needs, consider implementing Implement AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to allow user and service permissions.
AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is another security feature to consider for encryption. To protect against web exploits and DDoS attacks, make use of AWS WAF and Shield. Lastly, you need to set up Amazon CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail. They are essential to supervise your app’s performance, health, and activity.
SaaS Migration Strategy – Plan For Data Migration
Moving your critical data safely and efficiently is what sets in motion implementation of a correct migration strategy. Weigh in your priorities here.
For example, amount of data you want to move, and consistence of data during migration process. Preferable migration tools like AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), and consideration of how to verify a successful migration to the new cloud environment.
Regarding downtime, understand that near-zero downtime migration could be more complex but also very important for SaaS. Also, data load matters, as large data amounts may need specialized tools while the small ones can be done online.
Security And Compliance Considerations
This part of SaaS migration strategy should not be your afterthought priority. Because it may pan out regulatory penalties, loss of customer trust, and many other upsides upon non-compliance.
Ensure whether your cloud architecture aligns with applicable compliance frameworks like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, etc. You may consider checking AWS artifact to know compliance report and documentation. Define who can access what in your AWS environment. Plan for data encryption at rest (when stored) and in transit.
Consider options to ensure your applications and infrastructure are scanned for potential vulnerabilities.
Since AWS operates on shared responsibility model, it is obligated to ensure security of the cloud (e.g. hardware, network, data center) and security in the cloud (your apps, data, access control, etc.). Even if AWS ensures safe architecture, you are expected to configure your cloud environment properly.
Cost Estimation and Optimization
Though AWS cloud migration offers flexibility choice for customers, thanks to its pay-as-you-go model. But that doesn’t mean ruling out how to manage the costs. For this, check the platform’s Pricing Calculator to figure out the estimated cost of your resources and avoid overprovisioning the same.
Meaning, begin with what you need and scale up later as needed. This is called rightsizing resources. It helps control and manage the cloud costs as per your workload performance and capacity needs. You can also make use of AWS Budgets and Cost Explorer to manage your cloud costs by tracking and controlling your post-migration spending.
Develop a Cutover Plan (Go-Live Strategy)
The cutover (the transition from the old to the new system) plan lays the foundation for a smooth transition of your old environment to the new AWS system. Understanding this SaaS migration strategy to AWS is crucial.
For example, decide whether you plan to migrate your software applications in stages, moving less important components first.
After this phased rollout, consider how will you switch user traffic to the new cloud system. Meaning, will you opt for DNS changes, or load balancer configuration?
You must have a contingency rollback plan to revert to your old environment faster if something goes wrong. Also important to decide is your planning to communication with your users and stakeholders during the cutover.
Thorough Testing To Avoid Any Problems Later
This phase of SaaS migration strategy to AWS is like testing plumbing, electricity, and appliances before you move into your new house. Similarly, you need to test various things, like whether the application works in new cloud environment. Does it suit your performance goals in terms of response times? Does it properly handle increased user load?
Consider whether the new cloud environment is free from security vulnerabilities. Last but not the least, does it allow you to recover your application and data in case of a failure
Build A Skilled Workforce Ecosystem
This is a crucial pre-migration plan as it streamlines most of the critical things before you even start the heavy lifting of the migration itself. Training your team with the right knowledge and experience is crucial.
Identify what they don’t know and what they need about AWS knowledge. Provide comprehensive training on AWS services and practices to understand AWS options, AWS Lambda or containers, VPC, databases, security groups, and other things about AWS.
Arm your team with necessary AWS skills including dubbing knowledge so that it can execute trouble-free migration. Don’t go for “lift and shift’ to AWS just because you would figure it out later. It would be counterproductive when the fallouts like overspending, poor performance etc. would surface.
So, bottom line is that unless your team is equipped with necessary AWS knowledge and skills, a successful SaaS migration strategy to AWS won’t happen.
SaaS Migration Strategy: Best Practices For A Successful SaaS Migration To AWS
What defines a result-oriented SaaS to AWS roadmap is implementation of best SaaS practices. They include factors, from prioritizing security risks, collaboration, testing, validation to compatibility issues, cost management and skill gaps.
Here’s detailed, easy to understand best practices intended to help you migrate your SaaS applications to AWS.
Read More – Best practices for a successful SaaS Migration to AWS
Note – Don’t get confused that “Best migration practices” and “pre-migration planning” are same. The previous one lays out actions, principles and current processes a business follows during and after the migration. On the other hand, the latter one talks about strategy, assessment and preparation.
Planning And Assessment Before You Do Anything
You can’t think of SaaS migration without having a clearly defined business goal in place, right? Therefore, have clarity of why you are choosing migration. Are you doing this to save costs, or for speedy performance, better scalability, improved security, or what?
In addition, make a list of all your applications, databases, servers, networks, and data. Know how they interact and what they rely on. AWS Application Discovery Service can help you with this efficiently.
Consider a cloud readiness assessment. It will give you an idea of whether your business is ready for migration by evaluating various aspects of your current IT infrastructure. Try to identify potential challenges or problem areas that might require re-architecting.
Also important in this context involves choosing best migration strategies. They include rehost, replatform, refractor, retire, etc. Set up a team of qualified migration professionals, ensuring they have necessary budget, training and infrastructure.
Consider migrating your small, non-critical part of your application to validate your migration strategy. Spot any issues and refine processes before you opt for full migration.
Design For Cloud-Native And Multi-Tenancy
SaaS and multi-tenancy, though both seem interconnected, is technically different. SaaS is a business model whereas multi-tenancy is sharing resources with other tenants or customers to promote agility and cost-efficiency.
Anyway, consider designing your AWS architecture to support multi-tenancy. Results? You will optimize costs, utilize resources, and have operational efficiency for your SaaS applications.
To automate adjustment in resources based on demand, AWS offers services like Auto Scaling Groups and Elastic Load Balancing. Other services including serverless computing (AWS Lambda, and AWS Fargate) are worth considering.
Leverage the services to the productivity improvement of your application, ensuring it runs smoothly while handling fluctuating user loads without over-provisioning.
Since you will want your application and its underlying infrastructure handle failures, recover from disruptions, and provide seamless service to the end-users, design your SaaS architecture for resilience. For this, consider leveraging multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZs) and Regions for redundancy.
It also includes services like Amazon S3 for secure storage. AWS Backup for automated data protection. They act as a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery roadmap. Consider it a contingency plan for an unexpected event or emergency.
Migrate Data With Care And Validation Checks
Migrating your data to AWS requires thoughtful considerations. Choose relevant data transfer services that AWS provides. They are AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) for databases, AWS DataSync or Snowball for large files.
Implement “cutover” or strategy like “parallel processing” to minimize service interruption when transferring data. Also important here is ensuring that data migration process is accurate and consistent. For this, perform comprehensive validation checks after data transfer.
SaaS Migration Strategy: Common Challenges And How To Overcome Them
Though benefits like scalability, reliability, and cost-efficiency are certainly there when considering AWS cloud migration, implementing SaaS migration strategy to AWS is also not free from some challenges. What are they? Well, there’s summary rundown on some of those challenges and how to overcome them.
Common SaaS Migration Challenges:
Lack Of Goal
Not having a well-defined roadmap is certainly a key challenge, as it can confuse your teams, delay, or cause downtime or failed migration process.
Complex Data Migration
Migrating huge data volume poses a risk when it comes to ensuring data integrity, managing dependencies and reducing downtime during data transfers. Since data is a lifeblood of any SaaS application, even a remote possibility of compromising its integrity or availability would be detrimental.
Reducing Service Outages
Another challenge in SaaS migration is ensuring that the end-users don’t have to experience downtime and service disruption. Therefore, minimizing such risks is challenging, because, any unexpected or unplanned downtime can trigger customer backlash. It would also pan out revenue loss and damage to reputation.
Maintaining Regulatory Compliance
Ensuring safety of customers’ data and complying all regulations in the Cloud is another challenge. The gravity of such challenge can be understood with the fact that any security lapse can negatively impact customer confidence in your SaaS application, resulting severe penalties. Therefore, protecting sensitive data during transit and at rest, while ensuring compliance with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, or PCI-DSS is a constant challenge.
Application Incompatibility
This challenge occurs when legacy or old SaaS applications cause compatibility issues with cloud-native environments. If it happens, problems, like performance bottlenecks and need for major re-architecting may occur. This is also challenging as you can’t fix an ill-suited application with “lifting and shifting” solution. It can negate most of the benefits of cloud migration.
Unexpected Cloud Costs
This sort of challenge occurs when you carry out SaaS migration without proper planning and optimization. Costs for cloud migration would spiral out of control under such circumstances. Fact of the matter, you can’t underestimate the costs for storage, data transfer, and unused resources.
Lack Of Skills
This cloud migration challenge is serious. Why? Because having teams not knowing how AWS platform works would pan out inefficient migration processes, let alone increasing operational costs.
How To Overcome SaaS Migration Challenges
Develop A Goal-Based Roadmap
Comprehensively assess your current infrastructure and applications, in alignment with your business goals. Consider creating phased migration plan, starting with shifting less critical applications to see how it works.
Implement Solid SaaS Migration Strategy
AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) will help you carry out seamless database migration. Utilize other tools, like AWS DataSync if you mean to carry large-scale fine transfers. Pre-migration testing, if done carefully, would also help you with a solid strategy for your SaaS migration.
Minimize Downtime And Service Continuity
A migration strategy called Blue/Green deployments can help you lower downtime and risk. You can also consider AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing and Auto Scaling for high availability. And don’t forget to implement solid rollback procedures and a disaster recovery plan.
Prioritize Security And Regulatory Compliance
Implement strong access controls based on the principle of least privilege. This means users can have only the permissions to perform their tasks. Use Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for all accounts. AWS security services like AWS WAF and Shield for protection against DDoS attacks. Use AWS CloudTrail to maintain detailed audit trails and timely review compliance with regulations.
Invest In Skills
Comprehensively train your teams on AWS services and best practices. You can also engage with AWS professionals to ensure your teams are trained well.
Conclusion: Embracing The Future Of Your SaaS On AWS
The concept of SaaS migration to AWS cloud environment is not just a technical shift. It is a strategic move to place your business on a growth trajectory.
What you need is to proactively address common SaaS migration challenges to conclude AWS-destined shift successfully. Among various challenges you may encounter during migration processes, one of them is building a competent team. Having a team that is skilled and knowledgeable about suite of AWS services and how they work respectively is imperative.
Also to understand in this context is cloud migration is not just shifting your non-cloud infrastructure. You build a foundation on which your business will be able to perform seamlessly, providing satisfactory customer experiences.
The cloud-hosted foundation boosts your product development and empowers your business with scintillating benefits, all helping it to grow boundlessly in today’s competitive business landscape.
AWS is not just a popular Cloud platform. It has become the most preferred cloud destination for organizations eying for flawless business growth.
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About Author: Pawan has 15 years of experience in creative writing on multiple genres, including Real Estate, Digital Marketing, Lifestyle, Spirituality, and FinTech. Over the last five years, his concentrated focus is on technical writing as a topic authority in SaaS and AI. Consult him on rmc@readmycontent.com for creative writing services.