Performance efficiency and reliability
During a mergers and acquisitions transaction, reliability becomes very important. This is because it is during the transaction that the two companies must merge their systems, data, and operations. Having a high level of reliability is crucial to maintain smooth business operations.
-
Customer experience: During mergers and acquisitions, there are many moving parts (like due diligence, integration planning, and customer communications), and it's critical to maintain a good customer experience. Any downtime or performance impacts to the applications and services that customers are using can reflect poorly on the new organization and damage customer relationships. AWS provides a highly available infrastructure, but the applications and systems also need to be architected for high availability to avoid any downtime. Combined organization workloads should be designed for planned and unplanned outages. AWS provides tools like Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Auto Scaling, and Amazon CloudWatch to help monitor performance and scale resources as needed.
-
Scalability: Mergers and acquisitions transactions often have uncertain workloads due to increased customer activity or data migration. The systems should be able to scale to meet these demands to avoid poor performance or outages. AWS provides a scalable infrastructure, but applications also need to be built leveraging auto-scaling and load balancing.
-
Agility: Strong performance means resources and workloads have enough capacity and are architected to allow them to scale and evolve as needed to support the business. This agility is especially important during integration due to uncertain capacity needs and constant changes in resource requirements. Poor performance means resources are being under-utilized or over-provisioned, leading to increased costs, impeded agility, and poor adaptability. Performance monitoring and optimization is key to managing costs.
-
Operational efficiency: Optimal performance means AWS resources and workloads are operating efficiently. This reduces the time and effort required by operations teams to manage the infrastructure, freeing them up to focus on integration. Slow or degraded performance can significantly impact operational efficiency.
-
Risk mitigation: Suboptimal performance of critical workloads poses risks to the business, such as loss of revenue, customer attrition, and reputational damage. Proactively monitoring and optimizing performance helps mitigate these risks during an integration.
-
Data integrity: As companies exchange sensitive data, it is important that the data is not corrupted or lost. While AWS provides mechanisms like Amazon EBS snapshots and Amazon S3 versioning to protect data, the systems also need to be designed to maintain and back up data properly.
In summary, to enable a successful mergers and acquisitions on AWS, reliability in all its aspects (availability, integrity, scalability, security, and cost management) should be designed and built into systems. With AWS, most of the infrastructure reliability is taken care of, but applications also need to leverage AWS services to achieve end-to-end reliability.
As part of integration, choose the right architecture that supports performance and reliability requirements for the combined organizations.
Scenario A
In this case, it is essential to establish availability (RTO and RPO) and SLA requirements for the combined organization. This lens provides guidance on the following practices:
-
Managing robustness and availability of the applications
-
External systems integrations and dependency
-
Use of domain knowledge and intellectual property
-
Data availability and backup strategy
Combined organization is likely to have more customers running on company workloads. Select an architecture that will allow more customer usage and drive company growth. It is critical to choose cloud native architecture that will scale per requirements. Similar guidance applies to scenario C.
Scenario B
In this case, this lens helps you perform customer migration with minimal impact. Choose appropriate DR options, including Region selection, uncover open-source dependencies impacting the reliability of the workload, and monitoring workloads based on availability and reliability requirements.
