For start-ups operating in a digital-native world, ‘let’s go AWS’ is not a reason for particular excitement; it’s simply the established standard. Businesses that still have little to no established business processes can go all out with AWS.

Larger companies with decades of history behind them, however, already have a set IT landscape containing everything from the mainframe to client-server architectures to web services. They will not be able to migrate all workloads at short notice, and, in some cases, migration is totally impossible.

A typical plan for changing an IT landscape based on legacy systems over to AWS spans several years. Most of the landscape is migrated within one to three years, while a small remainder follows in the subsequent years.