Delivering efficiencies in Data Centre Migration

Our clients are among the largest institutions in the financial and telecommunication sectors in Australia servicing customers across Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Due to the complex application landscape, these organisations had scattered data centres around Australia for supporting their applications. As these data centres reached their end-of-life, relocation to new state-of-art data centres became imperative. However, the lack of any migration approach together with the complex applications profile posed a serious obstacle to implementing such  a change. The main challenges faced by our clients were:

• Hard deadlines for exit due to contractual obligations
• No relocation strategy for migrating existing workloads to the cloud
• Lack of knowledge for maximising return on investment

Opportunities

The data centre exits had to be completed within a fixed deadline of less than two years to comply with property lease agreements. Likewise, huge capital investment dictated the need to use this opportunity to alleviate existing software and hardware currency risks by transforming and upgrading their applications and infrastructure as a part of the relocation program. Seisma was engaged to develop an exhaustive migration strategy to achieve the dual objectives of exiting the data centre in time, while improving the hardware and software currency profiles of their applications. The success of the Data Centre Migration Program was dependent on Seisma's ability to assess the applications and construct a migration roadmap that aligned with competing demands.

The Solution

Our team was able to leverage our Data Centre Migration Methodology to develop a tailored approach to assess the large and complex application landscape and recommend solutions. The exit strategy was implemented in three phases:

• Understanding the application landscape (assessment and feasibility) — through workshops and deep-dive sessions with technical architects and application SMEs, we developed an application assessment tool that provided predictability and consistency in assessing applications based on key levers; application maturity, life-cycle stage, longevity and risk profile. This enabled us to recommend migration options and treatment types (transform, decommission, virtualise, etc.)  best suited for each application
• Brokering between key stakeholders to agree on migration options (planning and decision) — our consultants conducted sessions with stakeholders to socialise  the migration strategy and  agree on recommendations  for each application
• Developing a migration roadmap (execution and governance) — we developed a migration roadmap based on assessment results captured during the assessment  and feasibility phase. A business case with end-to-end program costing and timelines was developed and presented to the investment committee for endorsement. A tightly controlled governance framework was proposed to ensure minimum deviation from goals and no cost wastages from scope creep

Results and Benefits

Seisma successfully implemented Data Centre Migrations, which delivered:

• The roadmap, migration strategy and business case with a concise, predictable and clear direction to deliver the successful migration of more than 500 applications and 3000 servers
• Data driven analysis and succinct recommendations resulted in quick decision making and endorsements which improved infrastructure delivery time by more than 50%
• Establishment of a Strong Governance Framework delivered more than 300 environments and created an ongoing infrastructure capability for our client

Insights

Data centre exits present a real challenge for big organisations and call for a strong relocation strategy. It is necessary to cover all critical aspects such as existing environment definitions, integration requirements, security controls, data classification, culture and licensing. A strong relocation strategy goes a long way in ensuring the organisation’s preparedness in meeting future challenges posed by ever changing technological advancements. Such an initiative requires building a strong platform by incorporating best practices vital for data centre relocations and this can generally take between 6–12 months.

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_{*This case study is sourced from acquired company coIB's archives. Exact publish date not known.}

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