Reducing Infrastructure Costs by 66% by Migrating to AWS

As usage of SilverBlaze's applications grew, the company faced escalating costs from its colocation data center provider — with no corresponding improvement in value or capability. The hosting environment was small, couldn't offer the scalability and performance needed to meet service-level agreements, and required advance notice to scale capacity. SilverBlaze was approaching a costly contract renewal and needed to act quickly.

The organization needed a cloud provider that could deliver:

• High performance and low cost at scale
• The ability to scale up or down without advance notice to a third party
• Improved disaster recovery and high availability for customers
• A migration path that minimized disruption to end users who access the platform around the clock
• A fast migration timeline to avoid renewing the expensive data center contract

Without a solution, SilverBlaze faced continued cost increases, performance constraints, and an inability to innovate — with funds locked into infrastructure rather than product development.

SilverBlaze chose AWS as its cloud provider and engaged Atayo Group, an AWS Partner with a proven track record of migrating customers to AWS. To meet the tight timeline and minimize customer disruption, Atayo proposed AWS Application Migration Service (AWS MGN) — a service that automates the conversion of source servers to run natively on AWS, minimizing time-intensive, error-prone manual processes.

Atayo's engagement included:

• AWS Application Migration Service to perform block-level replication of 45 source servers to AWS in near real time, with a recovery point objective of seconds throughout the migration
• Continuous sync during testing — when SilverBlaze launched test environments using AWS MGN, the service continued syncing with source machines, allowing new test environments to be relaunched without resyncing replicas each time — significantly reducing time between test cycles
• Wave planning and cutover execution — the migration began in February 2022 and concluded in April 2022, one week ahead of the contract deadline, with a cutover window of less than one hour
• Instance rightsizing — post-migration, Atayo helped SilverBlaze right-size instances and select instance types better suited to their workloads, further reducing costs
• Security and compliance improvements — leveraging AWS built-in security features to reduce the time SilverBlaze employees spent managing security and compliance

"We've used AWS Application Migration Service a lot in the past and have had fantastic success with it," said Luis Fonseca, Solution Architect at Atayo. "Not only did the service meet the requirements for what SilverBlaze was trying to accomplish by migrating in a particular timeline, but it also just makes the process of migrating and doing lift-and-shift operations incredibly simple."