Rackspace today announced it has been named an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) Partner to help businesses migrate to AWS. This program seeks to help enterprises accelerate migration to AWS by leveraging designated AWS Partner Network (APN) members to provide consulting support, training, and services credits. Rackspace, which delivers true transformation as a service across applications, data, security, and infrastructure, will leverage its proven AWS migration expertise to simplify the process for moving workloads and applications to AWS. As a designated AWS MAP Partner, Rackspace can help customers reduce the risk of migrating to the cloud, build a strong operational foundation, and offset the initial costs of migrations.  

To become a designated AWS MAP Partner, APN Partners must attain the AWS Migration Competency by demonstrating technical proficiency and proven customer success enabling enterprise customers to migrate applications and legacy infrastructure to AWS. Additionally, AWS MAP Partners must have the documented process to adhere to AWS best practice migration methodologies.

According to a recent report by Gartner, AWS is the provider not only chosen by customers that value innovation and are implementing digital business projects, but it is also preferred by customers that are migrating traditional data centers to cloud IaaS.

"With more businesses moving out of corporate data centers and onto the cloud, reliable migration services are in high demand," said Ven Shanmugam, general manager, Fanatical Support for AWS at Rackspace. "Since becoming an AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner in 2015, we've built robust offerings to help businesses move workloads and applications to AWS. We're excited to be recognized by AWS as an AWS Migration Acceleration Program Partner and look forward to helping customers accelerate their digital transformations by applying reliable and efficient best practices for migrating to AWS."   

As a Premier Consulting Partner in the APN, Rackspace has a global team of experts that hold more than 1,000 AWS technical certifications, and consistently demonstrates value to customers by providing migration services for business critical workloads. In May 2017, Rackspace also launched its Fanatical Support for AWS Professional Services to support customers who are new to or growing on AWS, and need deep, customized expertise in key areas such as migration, as well as application modernization including architectural design, cloud automation and DevOps.

"If you just lift and shift something from one platform to another, you're not leveraging the cloud for what it's designed to give you, which is flexibility, resiliency and scalability," said Aaron Bowden, head of environments at OFX, a Rackspace customer. "Rackspace doesn't try to push a cookie-cutter solution. They are interested in discovering what the project is all about and helping to make sure the solution we come up with is a best fit for OFX - that's why we migrated to AWS with the help of Rackspace."

As an AWS MAP Partner, Rackspace will help customers migrate to AWS following the specific AWS MAP methodology. Rackspace will guide customers through each phase of their migration journey, including: 

• Migration Readiness Assessment Phase: Determines the current state of a customer's readiness to migrate and identifies areas where they already have strong capabilities and where further development is needed to migrate at scale.
• Migration Readiness and Planning Phase: Rackspace teams with customers to help them plan and build detailed blue prints for large-scale migrations and help new AWS users gain experience migrating and operating workloads on AWS. The AWS MAP Partners leverage a prescriptive methodology and approach based on best practices gleaned from hundreds of customer migration projects that reduce time to migrate, while lowering cost and risk.
• Migration Phase: Rackspace will work with customers to help them execute the migration plan developed during the migration readiness and planning phase.
  

In addition to becoming an AWS MAP Partner, Rackspace has achieved AWS Competency status in seven key areas including Financial Services, Migration, Storage, Microsoft Workloads, Oracle, DevOps, and Marketing and Commerce. This year, Rackspace was also named a leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide.

For additional information on the Migration solutions Rackspace can offer to customers, please visit: www.rackspace.com/managed-aws/capabilities/migration.