Businesses who flock to Amazon cloud with the goal of simplifying infrastructure may find that moving their data there is not the cakewalk they thought it would be. Amazon Web Services seems to be on a split mission to be the simplest and most advanced, which just resulted in 1,000 announcements of new tweaks to the service. Startups are cropping up to fill the gap between a company’s wish to move to cloud and their wherewithal to get there.

Jeff Aden, founder and EVP of marketing and strategic business development at 2nd Watch Inc.; John Bruett (@JohnBruett), technical manager at Covanta Ltd.; and Jeff Singer, associate director of cloud engineering at Covanta, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during AWS re:Invent. (*Disclosure below)

Singer revealed how his company decided to heed the call of cloud. “We’d been working with other SaaS solutions before and said, ‘You know what? Having this physical data center really isn’t doing us any good,'” he said.

How this company moved 40 apps in 16 weeks

Bruett said when the company decided to move to cloud, “We looked for a partner that specifically did what we were looking to do, which was basically shut down our data center.”

Bruett said they chose 2nd Watch in part because of its track record, which included moving Conde Nast to the cloud.

Lift and shift the business model

Aden said that after closing a data center and making the move, a real transformation of the business is possible. “If you architect it properly, you’re going to get a 30 to 60 percent savings just from that lift and shift,” he said.

The next step, he said, is to technically optimize applications, perhaps through auto-scaling. “You then can say, ‘How can I financially optimize that?'” he explained.

Finally, according to Aden, you can “evolve” the business by asking, “Am I using the best cloud service product to really evolve this to where either I reduce my management cost, I reduce my downtime, I increase my performance, I really make it hum?” he said.

*Disclosure: AWS and other companies sponsor some AWS re:Invent segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent.

Photo by SiliconANGLE