A Better Approach to Cloud

Avid’s ambitious cloud adoption program is paying off – and they’re just getting started.

The first thing you see when you step through the double doors of Avid’s Burlington, MA headquarters is a row of glass pillars, each radiating a soft, golden glow. On top of each pillar sits an award – in total, two Oscars, a Grammy and 14 Emmys.

Avid is the world’s leading provider of professional audio and video production technology. Their products are used to create award-winning films like The Martian, Spectre and Mission: Impossible, and they are in the middle of an ambitious, multi-year IT modernization initiative. We sat down with Avid CIO Jonathan Thomas (JT) to discuss their cloud migration project.

"As more and more companies turn to AWS to expand their cloud capabilities, it was clear we needed to develop a structured program that would safely accelerate enterprise cloud initiatives,” explains Bruce Coughlin, SVP Cloud Technology Partners.

The Cloud Adoption Program (CAP) takes companies through 6 key tenets of cloud adoption starting with strategy and economics, all the way through portfolio assessments and migration, to DevOps and CloudOps. While companies may enter the Cloud Adoption Program at different points, the majority share a common set of requirements and objectives that CAP addresses in a structured, consistent manner.

Avid’s cloud adoption progressed in a similar fashion. In the strategy and economics phase, a TCO / ROI analysis demonstrated a strong business case for moving to AWS: Avid would reduce its IT data center operations expenses by 50%.

Moving through the Cloud Adoption Program, the Avid team completed portfolio assessments and automated the deployment of Avid’s Virtual Private Clouds before entering the application migration phase of the project.

Workloads moved to AWS run the gamut from mission critical back office applications to customer facing, revenue generating web applications including: Cognos, Confluence, Ping, Sitecore and AVID Licensing Applications. CloudEndure’s real-time, continuous block-level replication was used to reliably migrate the entire stack of both physical and virtual servers to AWS.

We migrated Avid’s enterprise and customer facing applications from a traditional hosting company to AWS while optimizing operations in several areas.– MIKE DRAPER VP, CTP