Guidance for academic medical center data center migrations

Academic medical centers (AMCs) are under pressure to reduce costs, innovate at scale, and improve operational performance. To do this, they’re turning to the cloud. But developing a request for proposal (RFP) for a data center migration to the cloud can be challenging for organizations who have not used cloud at scale yet.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) works with AMCs globally, and with our experience supporting data center migrations, we have observed procurement practices that help customers move quickly while fully extracting the benefits of the cloud. This blog post presents guidance for those procurement practices that can be used when an AMC is looking to solicit cloud services for a data center migration separate from the integration services to perform the migration.

The guidance is organized in four parts. Parts 1 and 2 offer a perspective on what AMCs could request of prospective cloud vendors to demonstrate their cloud aptitude in the context of an AMC environment and how to request pricing of cloud services providers (CSPs) when parity may not exist between CSPs’ services. Part 3 offers a structure in which to develop evaluation criteria for a cloud solicitation, and AMCs can populate the weightings they feel are most appropriate. Part 4 offers a sample dataset of customer-furnished data provided to cloud vendors, so CSPs can price their respective solutions. These four parts are not exhaustive, but this blog post can serve as a quick guide to generate discussions and aid in pulling together data you will need for your data center migration Request For Proposal (RFP).

Part 1: AMC data center migration vendor background and technical assessment

When creating a cloud services solicitation, AMCs want to know about the CSP’s history, experience, technical aptitude, and services relevant to their environments. Cloud services RFPs are outcome-based and less prescriptive than traditional IT RFPs. AMCs can use the following table to prompt a vendor background and technical assessment in a CSP solicitation.

The prompts in the table ask the CSP to provide a perspective on its capabilities aligned to the AMC’s needs and environment, which the AMC provides details about in Part 4, as well as the CSP’s approaches to accomplishing outcomes. The prompts below are designed to help the AMC understand how the CSP can help it achieve its business outcomes and objectives. In the following, where the prompts say, “insert Electronic Health Records system name,” substitute your electronic health record (EHR) system.

Vendor background	Provide a brief history, including year established and number of years your company has been offering cloud services. Provide an overview of industry-recognized third-party analyst reports that demonstrate your proven capabilities and reliability. Provide key differentiators for customer consideration within healthcare.
Healthcare expertise	Describe native purpose-built healthcare services and solutions as well as client references.
	Describe how your partners support healthcare.
	Give an overview of your healthcare specific organizational resources, i.e., healthcare experts on staff, enablement programs, training, etc.
Partners	Describe partner competencies for both data center migrations and healthcare specific workloads.
	Provide details about how you support your partners (training, documentation, administrative support, etc.).
Internal managed service capabilities	Describe your internal capabilities for healthcare migration programs/advisory services and implementation services.
Applications	Explain how {insert electronic health records system name} is hosted in your cloud. Include your current sizing capabilities and roadmap for growth.
	Explain how {insert electronic health records system name} hosted on your cloud integrates with other applications. List other {insert Electronic Health Records system name} integrated applications that are supported natively or as software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions in your cloud.
Security	Describe your company’s approach to security for its own infrastructure and in the services you offer.
	Describe how your cloud can help customers meet compliance certifications like System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 27001, GxP, Personal information (Pi), U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).
	Describe the access management and encryption tools you have available.
Compliance	List your security and compliance certifications and accreditations.
	Describe how your platform supports data governance.
Reliability/scalability	Describe your global network, regions, and availability zones and their relationship to service level agreements (SLAs) and historic SLA performance.
	Describe your reliability posture, reliability performance trends, and investments/actions taken to support high reliability.
	Describe how you would reduce recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) using your solutions.
Solution offerings	For each service category, describe your capabilities and answer additional questions below:
	Compute: Provide performance details of your offering with datasets and images of various sizes.
	Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML): Provide three AI/ML analogous customer use-cases.
	AI/ML: Describe the built-in natural language processing (NLP) services in your offerings that can extract meaning from unstructured data.
	Data analytics: Describe how your offerings support data exploration, visualization, and the ability of users to create self-serve analytics.
	Data analytics: Describe how your offerings can convert health data information into a unified common data model and enable a common data repository for sharing and analytics purposes.
Migration approach	Describe solution offerings to support a customer’s current architecture.
	Discuss services or tools to assist us in identifying applications that are ready for the cloud, based on your healthcare experience.
	What are your recommended best practices for clients in establishing/updating business continuity and disaster recovery plans when moving to the cloud?
	Describe your approach to automation and automation strategy.
	Explain why your services, other offerings, and methodology would make the migration a success.
	How could a customer better prepare for a cloud migration? Describe your overall migration workstreams, timelines, dependencies, training, and outcomes.
	Describe your approach and processes to optimizing the existing license portfolio and managing it going forward post migration.
	Describe your methods or techniques to consolidate technologies within a migration.
	What resources are available to support the readiness of the organization to successfully operate and manage workloads in the cloud once migrated?

Part 2: AMC data center migration vendor evaluation price assessment

Assessing price requires that AMCs understand a CSP’s pricing model in addition to how much cloud services will cost once a data center has migrated to cloud. For that reason, this guidance includes a price assessment and a pricing scenario. The price assessment helps AMCs understand the CSP’s pricing model, what incentives a CSP offers, and what cost management tools exist. Cloud services are usually priced on-demand, which means customers only pay for what they consume. That means if an AMC uses more or less of a particular service than originally anticipated, its actual costs will adjust accordingly. Additionally, it’s important to take technical advantages into account when comparing price, so AMCs can estimate how much their true total cost of ownership will be. Pricing scenarios are a good way to help AMCs compare the overall estimated cost of a project. Below is a sample pricing scenario, which you can adjust to reflect something closer to your environment.

Price assessment

Pricing model	Describe your company’s pricing model.
	Provide a link to publicly-available cloud pricing.
Incentives	Describe what migration discounts, incentives, and more your company offers.
	Describe any education/research discounts your company offers.
	Provide details about volume-based discounts your company offers.
Cost management tools	Describe what tools your company offers to manage and monitor cloud costs.

Pricing scenario

In the vendor evaluation, AMCs can ask their vendor to provide estimated pricing along with expected services and applicable discounts used for the following scenario. Where the text says to define, make sure to input requirements similar to your needs:

Customer is migrating [define] applications to cloud, this includes [define number and type] of servers. Utilization of the existing servers is on average [define]%. We need [define] latency and [define] throughput. Number of expected users are [define]. Number of applications to be supported are [define]. Separate pricing for each service category, i.e., compute, network, storage, managed relational database, managed non-relational database, analytics, end user computing, security, monitoring, migration and transfer, and provide a total estimated price per year and over three years. Provide publicly available pricing for each service category and provide discounts for the same. Pricing can be based on most common configuration of the services. Clearly document any assumptions you have made relative to types of instances a customer would likely use and why and how changing those assumptions would impact price.

Part 3: Notional evaluation criteria

AMCs need to provide evaluation criteria in a solicitation, so CSPs know what is important for the AMC. This criteria can include both the functional and technical capabilities of the CSP, as well as the AMC’s price requirements. This can help AMC leaders to align on what is most important to them in working with a CSP, and can help guide discussion when comparing multiple CSPs.

The following sample evaluation criteria shows how you can add the weighting such that the total points equal 100 (A+B+C+D+E+F+G+H=100).

Functional and technical:

1. Background and industry experience– A%
2. Strength of solution offerings – B%
3. SLAs and contracts- C%
4. Strength of partner ecosystem- D%
5. Support- E%
6. CSP demonstration- F%

Price:

1. Explanation of discounts, tools, and pricing methodology in price assessment- G%
2. Pricing scenario – H%

In addition to these technical and price assessments, a best practice in comparing vendors often includes a vendor demonstration, in which the CSP showcases a range of capabilities requested by the AMC. This allows AMCs to interact with the CSPs and ask questions of the people with which they may be working.

Conducting a live demonstration with a CSP

The Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) coalition provides recommendations for organizations in procuring cloud technology. Among these recommendations is a live demonstration from the CSP of various services. In a CSP demonstration, such as for a data center migration, for example, AMCs should consider taking a holistic view of the CSP’s platform. This means asking the CSPs to live demonstrate topics like the following: security, performance, reliability, cost management, and operational resilience. AMCs can allow vendors to propose an agenda aligned with the demonstration topics. AMCs should explain how much time vendors have to present and build in time dedicated for questions and answers. Live demonstration topics may include the following capabilities from the CSP:

Security: Governance, identity, and threat detection
Performance: Scalability, right-sizing, serverless
Reliability: Backup, disaster recovery, and resilience to failures
Cost management: Budget and cost allocation
Operational resilience: Monitoring, support, and automation

For every demonstration topic, AMCs can explain what requirements they would like the CSP to show during the live demonstration. AMCs can use the following scoring methodology for each topic:

1: Unable to demonstrate requirements

2: Able to demonstrate some but not all requirements

3: Able to demonstrate requirements but methodology is not user-friendly

4: Able to demonstrate requirements in a user-friendly way.

The summation of scoring for each topic forms the CSP demonstration score, which can be included in the overall evaluation criteria.

Part 4: Customer-furnished technical data

You can populate the following table with the technical details of your use case to give CSPs details about your current environment. This information helps CSPs customize answers and approaches to prompts based on the size and scope of your environment.

Current environment data	Example	Notes
Server name	Prod01	The name of the asset.
Central processing unit (CPU) Cores	4	For virtual machines: the number of vCPU. For bare metal servers: the number of physical cores.
Memory (MB)	4096	The number of MB of RAM allocated.
Provisioned storage (GB)	500	The total number of GB of storage allocated.
Operating system	Windows Server 2012R2	The operating system version.
Is virtual?	TRUE	TRUE if this a virtual machine. FALSE if this is bare metal server.
Hypervisor name	Host-1	The runtime host of the virtual machine. If not provided, a host will be assumed. For bare metal servers, this should be left blank.
CPU string	Intel Xeon E7-8893 v4 @ 3.2GHz	If not provided, three-year old hardware will be assumed.
Environment	Production	This will impact licensing and migration strategies. Common values are production, dev, test, QA, or staging.
SQL edition	SQL Server 2012 Enterprise	Microsoft SQL Server edition. Supported version are: SQL Server Enterprise, and SQL Server Standard.
Application	ServiceNow	Used to group servers into workloads.
CPU utilization peak (%)	60%	Valid range: 0 – 100. If not provided, assumption will be made based on the environment.
Memory utilization peak (%)	95%	Valid range: 0 – 100. If not provided, assumption will be made based on the environment.
Time in-use (%)	100%	Valid range: 0 – 100. This represents the percentage of time the server is known to provide business value. If not provided, 100% In-Use will be assumed. If set to 0, the server will be tagged as a zombie and excluded from right-sized recommendations

Conclusion

Data center migrations require purposeful coordination across teams within the AMC and with the vendors supporting its migration. AMCs can use this guidance to coordinate discussions about what factors are most important to its migration success, align teams around the success factors, gather data needed for the RFP, and write the RFP. Utilizing this guidance can help you get buy-in from disparate teams, migrate faster, and reduce costs — so you can accelerate time to innovation and more.

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