Innovation through Cloud Migration

Our client is one of the four largest financial institutions in Australia, servicing customers across Australia, New Zealand and Asia. To improve market competitiveness and penetration, several technology initiatives were undertaken to increase their service footprint and optimise management cost. Special focus was to adopt cloud platforms to create a low-cost and expandable IaaS capability. The main challenges faced by our client were:

• Surging IT run cost due to a large number of applications
• Inflexible infrastructure platform; driven by technical and operational complexities
• The need for a scalable platform to ensure continuous improvements in infrastructure delivery

The Opportunity

Our client was confronted with the significant challenges inherent in most cloud migration initiatives, such as integration complexities, technical and operational readiness dependencies, licensing and commercial loopholes, data classification gaps and cultural misalignments. Also, being a greenfield initiative, the client was keen to perform a Proof of Concept (PoC) to test feasibility before commencing a full-scale migration. More than 1,500 existing development/ test OSIs (servers) across 200+ applications were identified for migration to a cloud-based solution. The huge volume of data sets, coupled with strict regulatory requirements of the Australian financial sector, demanded a methodical approach to ensure a smooth and seamless transition. Seisma was engaged to oversee the entire project from planning until implementation, including the PoC to validate feasibility.

The Solution

Our team utilised a Cloud Migration Approach to shape an overarching migration program covering all phases from planning to implementation, including decommissioning of servers. The key activities performed covered:

• Development of a Phased Cloud Migration framework that incorporated the client’s agile delivery methodology, which delivered a flexible and reusable framework for migrations
• Early identification of suitable candidates during the ASSESS phase, which enabled accurate calibration of execution effort
• Establishing treatment type categories for implementation based on the client’s strategic needs
• Establishing the governance reporting framework, which involved regular progress updates at the client’s various leadership forums and funding committees
• Developing the decommissioning process to ensure benefit realisation by retiring physical servers  post migration

Results and Benefits

Seisma successfully implemented an IaaS platform for the client, which:

• Delivered a PoC and confirmed migration feasibility for more than 150 OSIs and 20 assets
• Reduced operating costs by over $400k/month (~70% reduction in OSI cost per month)
• Established a standard IaaS platform, ensuring non-tangible benefits of reduced footprint, improved reliability, flexibility, scalability and increased speed  to delivery
• Identified further cost reduction opportunities around automation, tooling, licensing and billing to deliver a continuous delivery model

Insights

The migration of existing assets into the cloud presents significant challenges in an enterprise of any size and should be clearly distinguished from traditional deployments. Any enterprise looking to migrate existing workloads to the cloud should first consider all underlying factors that may derail a successful migration, including the enterprise’s own environment configurations, integration requirements, security controls, data classification, culture and licensing. Such an initiative requires building a platform by incorporating best practices vital for delivery of high- quality infrastructure services. The gestation period for this is generally between 6–12 months.

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