This document outlines the AWS Value Creation Technical Due Diligence (TDD) framework for private equity firm acquisitions and mergers, detailing methodologies for evaluating cloud migration, modernization, and operational efficiencies. It emphasizes key deliverables including cost optimization, business agility, and benchmarking assessments, and offers insights from various industry case studies. The purpose is to guide firms in leveraging AWS services for enhanced value and operational performance post-acquisition.

1. © 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.© 2019, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
Tom Laszewski, Private Equity Transformation Advisor
AWS Value Creation
Technical Due Diligence (TDD) for Acquisitions and Mergers
August 2020

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Cloud Value Creation Levers Deep Dive
Well-Architected Reviews
Digital InnovationCloud Security Assessments
AI/ML Workshops
Modernization Readiness Review
Transformation Strategy Workshops
Migration Tooling Executive Briefings (EBCs))
Immersion Days
AWS Curated Playbooks, Runbooks, Workshops, Programs, and Offerings
Cloud Economics Business Case
Technical Debt Discovery
Experienced Based Accelerators
Workshops
AWS SaaS Factory and Marketplace
Migration TCO and ROI
FinHacks
PE Accelerate Discounts
Migration Credits
ProServ InvestmentsTraining Credits
AWS Platform Discovery OptimizationCost Optimization Reviews
Value Benchmarking
Industry Solution Group
IT Landscape Discovery
Business Agility Acceleration – Value Realization Tracking via KPIs

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M&A Lifecycle: Hypothesis to Exit
Firm Investment
Hypothesis
• AWS support of PE
Firms investment
hypothesis
• AWS support for
funds hypothesis
• Impact of cloud and
data on hypothesis
Technical Due
Diligence
• Post TDD 48 hour
report
• AWS proposal for
first 100 days
• Recommendations
on migration
/modernization,
innovation, go-to-
market
First 100 Days
• Cloud Economics
Business Case
• Cloud Capability
Assessment
• Cloud Manifesto
• Cloud Adoption
Office
• Identify Partners
First Six Months
• Non-AWS – Migrate
and Modernize
• AWS – Cost and
platform
optimization
• Training and
enablement
• Cloud Operating
Model - DevOps
• Digital Innovation
Workshops
Operate
• Operational
Excellence on AWS
• CI/CD
• Cost Optimization
One year before
sale
• ‘Fit for sale’ program
– data fabric, data
analytics, AI/ML,
Cloud Native
• AWS Marketplace,
SaaS, APN
AWS Proactive
Engagement
Pre-Acquisition Post-Acquisition
Value Creation

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Technical Due Diligence Journey with AWS
Preparing for TDDs Execution of Technical Due Diligence
Months before
First TDD
On-site
Five days or less Purchase Decision One Month after
Purchase decision
Day 0
Instructor lead and
self service
education
• Post mortem of TDD
• AWS delivers TDD
reports
AWS Proposal for
100 day plan
AWS helps with
100 day plan
Preparing for TDDs
• Playbooks
• Runbooks - Uses Cases / hypothesis questionnaires
• Self service training
• Instructor lead training
• GameDays
TDD with the target
• ROI and TCO Analysis
• Value Benchmarking
• AWS Technical Due Diligence report
• Cloud Capability Assessment Report
100 day planning
• Value Creation Acceleration Plan
• Customer case studies, reference
architectures, and other
supporting documents
• Enhancing the financial models
• Workshops and immersion Days
• Pilot migrations and/or
innovations
Two weeks
Before on-site
PE and/or
consulting firm and
bank analysis
documents to AWS
AWS on-site or
remote support
(email, Chime,
Slack)
AWS understands
PE fund investment
hypothesis
Post-Transaction

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Areas of Assessment and Hypothesis
The use case centric runbooks are focused on questions that can be used to generate a hypothesis including TCO, ROI, and/or value
benchmarking

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Business
Business Agility. Deploying new features/ applications faster and reducing errors. Value benchmarking –
customer satisfaction, time to market, time to deploy
IT finance. Impact of moving from Capex to Opex. Recommendations on consumption based budgeting, and
GAAP effects. Value benchmarks - IT spend on app per user, total IT infrastructure spend.
IT strategy and roadmap. IT and business alignment. Product and features roadmap including back office
systems.
Benefits realization. Benefits of IT investment using a Cloud Operating Model.
Digital Innovation. Access the targets current research and development strategy and execution. Determine
areas where the R&D organization can monetize investments in digital transformation technologies – mobile,
IoT, AI/ML, quantum computing etc.
Technology and Industry Solutions. Current technology stack and potential solutions from Amazon
Marketplace, AWS Solutions, AWS Quickstarts and ISV offerings. AWS provides case studies of example
savings by utilizing these AWS and partner offerings.

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People
Staff productivity. Efficiency improvement by function on a task-by-task basis. Value benchmarking - VM’s
managed per admin, TB’s managed per admin, employee satisfaction.
Training. Recommended training plan. AWS provides example case studies for reduce time and effort, and
increase ROI, for customers that have implemented comprehensive training plans.
Organization structure. CTO, CIO, and structure of IT including benefits of two-pizza teams and
productization. Utilization of partners.. Impact of these changes on the organization.
Culture. Leadership principals, COE, fail fast, and one and two way door decisions. Impact of these changes on
the organization.
Governance
Risk and Compliance. Governance programs such as data governance in cloud.
Financial Governance. Cost control, cost visibility.
Business performance management. KPIs – measuring impact of cloud. Business processes change.
Portfolio and product management. Projects to products, and waterfall to agile. Service deliver and
management.
Licensing. Moving to Amazon Linux, reducing legacy software licensing costs, and adoption of open source.

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Operations
Infrastructure Configuration and Provisioning Automation. AWS provides recommendations to automate
the configuration and provisioning of applications through Infrastructure as Code and AWS hybrid cloud
infrastructure automation services. Value benchmarking - Mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR)
Business Continuity / Operational Resiliency. Benefit of improving SLAs and reducing unplanned outages.
Value benchmarking - total monthly incidents, critical (P1/P0) incidents, app resilience rating
IT Service Catalog. Dashboard for publishing and consuming cloud solutions.
APM. Monitoring of application performance.
Service Monitoring. Monitoring of cloud services to meet SLOs.
Security
Cloud Security Assessment. The AWS security assessment covers infrastructure security, identity and access
management, detection, infrastructure assessment, data protection, incident response, application security,
risk, and compliance. Value benchmarking – security incidence, app security rating

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Platform
Migration (#1). Relocate or rehost of on-premises workloads to AWS. AWS provides TCO, ROI, and AWS cloud
in box solutions.
Cost Optimization (AWS) #2. AWS determines the cost optimization initiatives to reduce cost through AWS
purchasing options, instance types, spot, elasticity, etc. AWS provides recommendations and potential cost
savings.
Platform Optimization (#4). AWS Well-architected review to determine optimizations in the areas of cost,
operations, security, performance, and reliability - including elasticity. AWS provides recommendations and
potential cost savings.
Content Delivery Network. Migration of Akamai to Amazon CloudFront. AWS provides a high-level estimate
of the cost savings of migrating from Akamai to Amazon CloudFront.
Hybrid, multi, and poly cloud. Architect, provision, manage, operate, and secure a low latency
hybrid/multi/poly cloud. AWS provides references architectures, AWS cloud in box solutions, and AWS
services.

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Software
Application Modernization (#5). Modernize the applications that provide the highest cost savings or have the
highest business value – 10 or less critical applications. Modernize to a microservices, cloud native architecture.
AWS provides TCO, ROI, AWS cloud in box solutions, and value benchmarking.
Software as a Service (SaaS). AWS determines to potential to modernize the AWS environment to a multi-
tenant SaaS environment. AWS SaaS case studies.
Application Configuration and Provisioning. AWS provides recommendations to automate the configuration
and provisioning of applications through CI/CD. Value benchmarking - code deployment frequency
Technical Debt - AWS determines areas of technical debt reduction and potential improvements to reduce
technical debt, as well as future proof architectures. Value benchmarking - critical (P1/P0) incidents
Database re-platform to AWS (#3). Re-platform RDBMS and noSQL databases to Amazon EC2, Redshift, Aurora,
RDS, or another managed databases. AWS provides TCO, ROI, and AWS cloud in box solutions.
Data Lake and Data Analytics. Re-platform on-premises data lakes to AWS, or modernize existing AWS data lakes to
AWS cloud native solutions. AWS provides TCO, ROI, and AWS cloud in box solutions.
Database

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AWS Deliverables
Flash report with hypothesis
• The purpose of this document is to provide prescriptive recommendations. The strength,
weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in this document are based upon the intelligence
gathered during the TDD. The document provides tangible monetary value realization or
value benchmarks – empirical cost savings, staff productivity, resilience, and business
agility percentage savings, revenue production, and efficiencies gained, from customers
that have migrated or modernized to AWS, or innovated or optimized their existing AWS
environment.
ROI and TCO
• Migration, modernization, and re-platform person hours, and AWS run time costs based
upon AWS empirical data points, industry averages, and a set of assumptions.
Value Benchmarking Reports
• Results based on four cloud value benchmarking areas that provide a portfolio company
industry based insights to drive better outcomes.
Cloud Capability Report
• Results in a better understanding of the readiness of a portfolio company to undertake a
cloud migration or modernization effort, innovative pilot project, or digital transformation
initiative.

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Value Benchmarking
Cost savings (TCO) Staff productivity Operational resilience Business agility
KPI
§ Time to market
§ Time to deploy
§ Code deployment frequency
§ Customer satisfaction
§ Employee satisfaction
KPI
§ Application availability
§ Total monthly incidents
§ Critical (P1/P0) incidents
§ Security incidents
§ Mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR)
§ App resilience rating
§ App security rating
KPI
§ IT spend on app per user
§ Total IT infrastructure spend
KPI
§ VM’s managed per admin
§ TB’s managed per admin
Infrastructure cost savings/
avoidance from moving to the
cloud
Efficiency improvement
by function on a task-by-
task basis
Benefit of improving SLAs and
reducing unplanned outage
Deploying new features/
applications faster and reducing
errors
Cost Impact Value Impact
Example: 50%+ reduction in
TCO (GE)
Example: Over 500 hours per year
of server configuration time saved
(Sage)
Example: Critical workloads run in
multiple AZs and Regions for
robust DR (Expedia)
Example: Launch of new products
75% faster (Unilever)

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Cloud Value Benchmarking Report
Cost savings (TCO) Staff productivity Operational resilience Business agility
Cost impact Value impact
What is it?
Infrastructure cost savings/
avoidance from moving to
the cloud
Example
66% reduction in
application hosting and
deployment cost
(Thermo Fisher Scientific)
What is it?
Efficiency improvement
by function on a task-by-
task basis
Example
Cut search times by 90%
(Benchling)
What is it?
Benefit of improving SLAs
and reducing unplanned
outages
Example
Accelerated minor product
updates from once a year
to biweekly, with no
downtime
to customers (Heartflow)
What is it?
Deploying new features/
applications faster and
reducing errors
Example
Run simulations 98%
faster (Bristol-Myers
Squibb)
A report outlining cloud value benchmarking across four focus areas: cost savings, staff productivity,
operational resilience, and business agility according the industry of the company assessed.

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Value Benchmarking – Minimum Viable Benchmark (MVB)
Level One Benchmarking
• Industry
• Infrastructure Spend a percentage of overall IT spend
• Revenue of company
Level Two Benchmarking
• Same information as in the “Migration TCO and ROI – Minimum Viable
Estimate (MVE)”
Level Three Benchmarking
• Detailed inventory of all servers and storage – Output from a tool such as
TSO Logic, CloudChomp

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Cloud Capability Report
Cloud Operating Model recommendations. A detailed report including highlights, observations, and key
takeaways with recommendations to increase a company’s rating across each of the six CAF perspectives is
generated from the cloud capability assessment.

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Highlighted Case Studies – By Industry
Project Aurora Project Treasury
Travel
Migration, modernization, database
re-platform
Financial Services
Microsoft SQL Server to AWS
EC2
Social Media
MySQL to Amazon Aurora
Technology
Akamai to
Amazon CloudFront
AWS had a seat at the
table. AWS Playbook and
runbooks utilized
Tools Utilized: MPA, Cloud
Economics Business Case
AWS resources:
Transformation Strategist,
SA leader, Professional
Services Migration SME,
Cloud Economics SME
AWS was asked to provide a
SQL Server re-host cost to
AWS. AWS runbook utilized.
Tools Utilized: AWS Pricing
Calculator
AWS resources:
Transformation Strategist,
Migration SME
AWS was requested
urgent assistance for an
estimate to re-platform
CDN platform
Tools Utilized: Manual
(CloudFront SME)
AWS resources:
Transformation Strategist,
Amazon CloudFront SME
AWS provided remote
support. AWS Playbook and
runbooks utilized
Tools Utilized: MPA, Cloud
Economics Business Case,
AWS Well-Architected, AWS
NIST and CIS Quickstarts
AWS resources:
Transformation Strategist,
PE Solution Architect,
Professional Services
Migration SME, Cloud
Economics SME
Project Buzz Project Icelander
Travel ISV
Scaling on AWS
AWS Cost Optimization
Project Speedbird
AWS had a seat at the
table. AWS Playbook and
runbooks utilized
Tools Utilized: Cloud
Economics Business
Case, AWS Trusted
Advisor, AWS Cost
Explorer
AWS resources:
Transformation Strategist,
SA leader, AWS Cost
Optimization SME, AWS
Platform Optimization
SME, Cloud Economics
SME

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Project Buddha
Re-locate to AWS
Industry: Travel and transportation products and services company offering financial, commercial,
industry, and cargo solutions
AWS Engagement: AWS was asked to attend the on-site one day technical due diligence
engagement
AWS Deliverables: 1) TDD Observations, Hypothesis, and Recommendations report 2) Migration
disposition recommendations, TCO, ROI, and migration costs estimate. 3) Cloud Value Creation
Opportunities document
Timeline for AWS Deliverables
• Post on-site TDD Observations, Hypothesis, and Recommendations Report delivered within 24 hours of engagement
• TDD debrief and discussion with M&A deals team partners occurred within 48 hours of engagement
• Migration disposition, ROI and TCO analysis delivered to deals team within 6 hours
Projected cost savings
• Re-host to AWS: 3-year lift-and-shift analysis reflected a 39% cost savings from migrating with an average annual cost savings of $1.6M
• Staff productivity: 3-year staff productivity number of $1.4M
Outcomes
After the deal closed, 14 days after engagement, AWS delivered a two page Cloud Value Creation Opportunities document:
• Re-locate on-premises VMWare to VMWare Cloud on AWS
• Database re-platforming
• An industry-based AWS and portfolio company go-to-market program
Private Equity
Engagement

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Project Treasury
Re-host to AWS
Industry: Financial Services
AWS Engagement: A back of the napkin estimate of ongoing costs for migrating 150 virtual MS
SQL servers (130 SQL Web/20 SQL Standard) using ~70TB of storage total. Looking for run-rate
costs doing a lift-and-shift to EC2. How would you go about getting to that back-of-napkin?
AWS Deliverables: 1) Runtime cost of Microsoft SQL Sever on Amazon EC2
Timeline for AWS Deliverables
• The re-host cost was delivered to the M&A Advisory firm in less then 4 hours
Projected cost savings
• Re-host: AWS monthly cost of $26K compared to $40K for running on-premises.
M&A Advise
Engagement

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Project Oceanside
Re-host to AWS
Industry: Social Media
AWS Engagement: AWS provided high-level technical and cloud economics advice to the M&A
Advisory firm as they evaluated opportunities to drive efficiency in the acquisition target’s IT
infrastructure through adoption of AWS cloud computing services. Without knowing the
specifics of the acquisition target, AWS provided technical guidance and QuickStart references
based on the target company’s likely architecture and requirements in the social media space.
AWS Deliverables: 1) TDD Observations, Hypothesis, and Recommendations report 2)
Migration disposition recommendations, TCO, ROI, and migration costs estimate. 3) Reference
Architectures
Timeline for AWS Deliverables
• Post on-site TDD Observations, Hypothesis, and Recommendations Report delivered within 48 hours of engagement.
• TDD debrief and discussion with M&A deals team partners occurred with Advisory firm.
Outcomes
• Target was acquired 50 days post-AWS engagement.
Private Equity
Engagement

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Project Icelander
Re-platform Akamai to Amazon CloudFront
Industry: Technology
AWS Engagement: AWS was asked to provide the following: 1) How complicated is a migration
from a heavily customized Akamai environment to an Amazon CloudFront based solution? 2)
We want to estimate the cost of migration. 3) What incentives (beyond MAP) exist to migrate to
CloudFront? One-time funding or ongoing for months, etc.? 4) What PE specific incentives exist?
AWS Deliverables: 1) Benchmark and validation guidance from the CloudFront team 2) Follow-
up list of qualifying questions and slide deck to support recommendations to sponsor.
Key Actions Taken by AWS
• The re-platforming cost was delivered to the M&A Advise firm in less then 8 hours.
Projected Cost Savings
• ~$1M in costs saving annually after the first year with additional cost saving potential with further optimizations.
Outcomes
• AWS was identified as a top 3 cost take-out opportunity in the target’s infrastructure.
M&A Advise
Engagement

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Project Spider Monkey
Cost and Platform Optimization on AWS
Industry: Travel and transportation products and services company offering financial, commercial,
industry, and cargo solutions
AWS Engagement: AWS was asked to attend the on-site one day technical due diligence
engagement
AWS Deliverables: 1) TDD top observations 2) Flash report utilizing a 2x2 strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats format 3) Value benchmarking and cost savings for top two hypothesis –
cost optimization and scaling AWS at a reasonable cost. 4) Strategic recommendations – re-architect
Key Actions Taken by AWS
• Condensed AWS platform and cost optimization runbooks based upon limited time frame.
• Post on-site TDD Observations, Hypothesis, and Recommendations Report delivered within 2 days of completion of TDD.
Projected Cost Savings and Value Benchmarking
• AWS cost optimization: $100K a month once all recommendations have been implemented in the first two months two months
• Scaling on AWS with EKS: 11% cost per user using containers vs EC2 instances, staff productivity (73% improvement), operational resilience
(36% improvement), business agility (428% improvement)
Outcomes
After the deal closed, AWS immediately collaborated with the current AWS account team and the PE firm on 100 plans for:
• Scaling on AWS (platform optimization through microservices)
• Cost Optimization of AWS
• Re-architecture
Private Equity
Engagement

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