Enterprise Cloud Transformation: Practical Approaches to Migration and Modernization with WWT & AWS
In this article
Enterprise organizations investing in AI face critical challenges: testing architectures without production risk and coordinating multiple technology vendors into cohesive solutions. WWT's AWS Premier Partnership addresses these challenges through its Advanced Technology Center for risk-free validation, comprehensive multi-vendor ecosystem integration, and proven modernization methodologies. With over $1 billion invested in the ATC, and an additional $500 million invested in AI and specialized testing environments, WWT transforms cloud migrations into true modernization, enabling AI implementation at enterprise scale.
"Testing AI architectures in production isn't an option, and we need to prove these solutions work before we implement them at scale."
"We don't need a vendor selling us cloud services. We need someone who can bring together AWS, our existing infrastructure, services, and AI into an integrated solution with defined business outcomes."
Does this sound familiar? These challenges reflect the complexity facing enterprise IT leaders today as AWS's recent research shows 64% of enterprise organizations are investing in AI and 63% are accelerating cloud migration plans.
Success requires more than cloud services—it demands risk mitigation, coordination, and proven methodologies. WWT, an AWS Premier Tier partner, addresses these challenges with its Advanced Technology Center (ATC) for risk-free testing and validation. This world-class facility allows customers to validate architectures and complex integrations without any production risk. Beyond the ATC, WWT delivers comprehensive multi-vendor ecosystem integration and proven modernization frameworks that transform basic migrations into true cloud-native optimization.
WWT's AWS Premier Partnership Capabilities
As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, WWT designs, builds, migrates, and manages cloud solutions using AWS best practices. WWT has invested over $500 million in AI and has more than 10 years of experience delivering AI solutions. Beyond this deep AI expertise, WWT maintains specialized knowledge of AWS's leading services across multiple categories:
AI and Machine Learning Services:
Amazon Sagemaker - a fully managed cloud service from AWS that enables organizations to build, train, and deploy machine learning models at scale without managing underlying infrastructure, offering tools for every step of the ML workflow.
Amazon Bedrock - Foundation models and generative AI agents using various large language models including bring-your-own options. AWS handles scaling, security, and updates—no need to provision GPU clusters or tune infrastructure.
Amazon Q - Natural language processing for rapid deployment and quick ROI achievement.
Search and Analytics:
Amazon Kendra - Intelligent enterprise search service using ML for semantic understanding.
Amazon OpenSearch - Scalable search and analytics engine with AI integration options.
Amazon Sagemaker - While not a search engine, it's widely used to build custom AI/ML models for enterprise search.
High-Performance Computing:
Amazon EC2 HPC Instances - Provide powerful, scalable compute nodes optimized for CPU/GPU-intensive workloads.
AWS ParallelCluster - Cloud-based compute clusters for scientific and engineering workloads.
Amazon FSx for Lustre - Managed, high-speed, and scalable file system for fast data access.
NVIDIA DGX on AWS – Turnkey systems tuned for deep learning, AI training, and high-end data science workloads.
Elastic Fabric Adapter - Network interface to accelerate communication between EC2 instances for distributed workloads.
Beyond service expertise, WWT has earned formal AWS competencies—specialized partner certifications that validate technical expertise and proven customer success. These include:
Migration & Modernization Services - Ensures customers receive maximum AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) funding with secure migration best practices.
AWS Marketplace Services - Helps customers optimize cloud budgets and streamline marketplace transactions with additional support services.
Government Services Competency - Enables government customers to achieve Authority to Operate (ATO) compliance through secure, compliant landing zones in GovCloud deployments.
These competencies and service expertise are enhanced by WWT's unique physical infrastructure advantage.
Advanced Technology Center: Testing Without Risk
While AWS competencies validate expertise, enterprise customers need more than credentials—they need proof their solutions will work.
WWT's ATC is a state-of-the-art dedicated testing and validation environment for customer solutions.
Testing in production environments creates unacceptable risks—potential downtime, data corruption, security breaches, and business disruption that can cost millions. Unlike production-focused data centers, the ATC enables proof-of-concept development and solution testing without these risks, helping customers overcome real-world challenges and accelerate both IT and business outcomes.
The AI Proving Ground (AIPG), a specialized testing environment within the ATC, allows organizations to validate AI implementations without production environment risks or data exposure concerns—critical for customers experimenting with AI architectures.
Key ATC capabilities include:
- Full infrastructure simulation and testing
- Hybrid solution validation between on-premises and cloud components
- Multi-vendor integration testing across thousands of software and hardware components spanning all major clouds and on-premises installations
- Digital twin environments for industry-specific applications
WWT's ATC and AI Proving Ground help customers confidently validate complex solutions before committing resources, reducing project risk while accelerating time-to-deployment. These testing and validation capabilities have enabled WWT to deliver complex solutions across diverse enterprise environments.
Implementation Examples
Here's how these capabilities work in practice:
Financial Services: AWS Integration WWT integrated AWS technology for a major financial services company, enabling secure application testing during acquisition processes while maintaining security requirements. The solution allows testing applications against acquired companies before integration into the main environment.
Jersey Mike's Platform Development WWT's Application Services team developed Jersey Mike's mobile app and eCommerce platform using AWS infrastructure. The implementation leveraged modern DevOps practices to architect and automate infrastructure and application deployments. WWT's Cloud Foundation service offering provided custom cloud landing zone design addressing Jersey Mike's specific security, networking, and operational requirements.
These implementations highlight WWT's systematic approach to cloud transformation, which extends far beyond basic migration.
Migration and Modernization: Beyond Lift-and-Shift
While these examples demonstrate successful outcomes, many organizations struggle with a fundamental challenge: distinguishing between migration and true modernization.
Most organizations begin with basic server migrations but fail to capture cloud's full value. WWT's modernization approach refactors applications for cloud-native services, serverless architectures, and optimized resource utilization. This comprehensive expertise enables customers to innovate faster, reduce costs, and improve overall business agility.
WWT addresses the critical distinction between lift-and-shift migration and true modernization through three distinct accelerator programs. The programs are designed to teach experience through doing. The experience can then be leveraged to carry out full scale migration and modernization projects.
- Optimization Accelerator: Infrastructure, storage, and license optimization alongside migration planning.
- Migration Accelerator: Limited workload migrations that demonstrate feasibility.
- Modernization Accelerator: Source code-level evaluation for cloud optimization potential.
With cloud-native architectures in place, organizations can leverage advanced AI capabilities—an area where WWT brings significant depth.
AI and Generative AI Implementation
Beyond modernization, today's enterprises need AI capabilities to maintain competitive advantage. WWT's deep experience translates into comprehensive capabilities across multiple AWS services and use cases:
- Large language model-driven document searches and summarization
- Intelligent search systems for government agencies enabling effective citizen information queries
- AI-powered code refactoring for modernization projects
- Edge AI implementations across various industries
- Complex automation and customer experiences using AI Agents
WWT's technical AI capabilities are complemented by comprehensive AWS marketplace services and deep industry expertise.
AWS Marketplace Services and Industry-Specific Expertise
WWT's extensive AWS Marketplace Services help customers across all industries optimize cloud budgets, streamline procurement, and maximize software investments through proper implementation and feature utilization—addressing the common enterprise challenge of software underutilization.
This marketplace expertise supports WWT's deep industry-specific capabilities through the combination of WWT's expertise with leading software products.
Public Sector: WWT's Government Services Competency addresses Authority to Operate (ATO) compliance through secure, compliant landing zone implementation. The company develops intelligent search systems and automated response systems for public sector clients, leveraging AI to process large government datasets effectively.
Healthcare: Medical professionals on staff provide industry-specific insights for HIPAA-compliant solution architectures and clinical workflow optimization, ensuring solutions meet both technical and regulatory requirements.
Multi-Industry Approach: Rather than focusing exclusively on specific verticals, WWT works across all industries while maintaining deep expertise in key sectors, including domain experts in relevant fields providing specialized knowledge for implementations.
This marketplace expertise supports WWT's broader multi-vendor coordination capabilities.
Multi-Vendor Ecosystem Integration
Enterprise solutions require coordination across cloud infrastructure, networking and security components, storage and data management systems, and application middleware layers. WWT's premier-level partnerships enable more than vendor discounts—they provide direct access to vendor specialists and coordinated solution delivery across multiple technology ecosystems.
These multi-vendor coordination capabilities are demonstrated in WWT's current development projects.
Current Projects
2026 Special Olympics USA Games Application: WWT is developing the Champions app for the 2026 Special Olympics US Games on AWS infrastructure, incorporating AI components for enhanced user and athlete experiences through collaboration between WWT and AWS teams.
AWS Transform Integration: WWT works with emerging AWS services such as AWS Transform, which uses agentic AI to accelerate infrastructure, application, and code migration and modernization, delivering transformation projects up to 4x faster than traditional approaches.
WWT's combination of advanced testing, multi-vendor coordination, and proven methodologies enables customers to transform cloud investments into measurable business outcomes.