Migrating Mission-Critical Enterprise Workloads from On-Premises VMware to AWS: An Empirical Study of a Multi-Account Landing-Zone Reference Architecture and the Seven Rs Decision Framework
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-9246.IJETCSIT-V4I4P124Keywords:
Cloud Migration, VMware to AWS, Landing Zone, Infrastructure As Code, Seven RS Framework, Empirical Software EngineeringAbstract
Large enterprise deployments continue to operate substantial portfolios of mission-critical workloads on on-premises VMware virtualization, yet face increasing pressure to adopt cloud operating models that match shorter delivery cadences, variable demand patterns, and contemporary security expectations. This paper presents a reference architecture for migrating such workloads to Amazon Web Services and reports an empirical study of migration outcomes observed across a set of representative production deployments. The reference architecture comprises a multi-account landing zone with centralized identity, logging, and network mediation through a transit gateway; an infrastructure-as-code practice that combines Terraform modules with selective use of AWS CloudFormation; and an operational protocol based on migration waves, documented cutover procedures, and rollback-capable validation. Migration approaches were classified using the seven Rs framework, with the choice among retire, retain, relocate, rehost, replatform, repurchase, and refactor governed by a three-axis decision framework spanning business criticality, technical complexity, and strategic value. Across the deployments examined, we observe a 58 percent reduction in monthly compute cost per workload, a reduction of provisioning lead time from a median of 21 days to under 30 minutes, a reduction of mean time to recovery from 6.2 hours to 1.1 hours, a reduction of high-severity audit findings from 14 to 3 per cycle, and an increase of deployment frequency from monthly to multiple times per day. The results indicate that landing-zone-first migration with per-workload disposition decisions can deliver measurable operational and economic gains, with implications for how enterprise cloud.
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