No matter what’s driving your move to an AWS or Azure cloud, two things are true. One, you don’t want to under-provision, which could create performance and availability issues. And two, you don’t want to overpay, because no one ever wants to do that. One of the key decisions you must make is which Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure virtual machine instance configuration you need. It’s a scoping exercise, but several factors make this easier said than done.

Moving applications to a public cloud, no matter why you’re making that journey, is a high-stakes proposition. As an industry, we’re focused on rapidly moving forward to give our businesses the competitive edge they need. However, when it comes to cloud migration, we often fail to stop and ask some critical questions, and as a result we end up overspending and underperforming.

When mission-critical applications were all implemented within your data center, capacity management seemed easy – Most organizations deployed infrastructure sets (compute, network, and storage) to meet their 95 to 99% capacity requirement. For a retailer, that might mean planning around a “Black Friday” date (Cyber-Monday wasn’t around then). For a bank or a manufacturer using ERP or financial systems, this might instead be the end of year close.

January 30, 2020 As a healthcare CIO mandated with the transition to electronic healthcare records, you’ve done your due diligence, evaluated various EHR vendors and most likely settled on Epic, a software vendor with over 25% of the US acute care hospital market share. You’ve followed Epic guidelines for minimum hardware requirements and acquired what you believe is the right workstation, server, networking, and storage infrastructure for Epic.