A lot of organisations suffer from not meeting the demand of their IT Services, often halting organisation improvement in the process. It was like this for a UK organisation who manage the economic, environmental, and public transport side of a UK city – often they were being held back by the technology they had access to.
The organisation spent a lot of their day-to-day time managing the current datacentre servers and networks, leaving no resources to work on more initiative-taking solutions to improve the organisation. Leaving the organisation at a disadvantage in the ever-growing modern world.
To add to the organisation’s stress, was an approaching deadline with their datacentre contract – so they needed to decide on whether to renew, find another datacentre or… move to the Cloud.
The solution was clear – the Cloud.
To help the organisation, risual worked with them to understand their cloud-first technology strategy and how they wanted to improve their organisation. Some of the IT staff already had good existing skills in Microsoft technologies which made adoption easier.
A four-step plan was given to the organisation as a scenario. This involved moving all services our of their datacentre and into Microsoft Azure. The multi-stage approach meant that the current environment and data could be assessed before being moved to the Cloud:
- Step 1:
- Provide a risual Cloud Economics Assessment. Involving looking at all the client’s on-premise infrastructure and providing right-size recommendations, understanding the total cost of migrating to Microsoft Azure.
- Step 2:
- Build the foundational services in Microsoft Azure for any services that would be migrated. This includes governance and compliance controls to ensure all the Azure services were secure and production ready.
- Step 3:
- Move from the initial server-focussed assessment and group related organisation applications together for ease of understanding and access once they were migrated to Microsoft Azure. A more organisation-relevant view will then be created and allow further cost and performance optimisation. Separate, where needed, some applications into Platform as a Service (PaaS), and others into Software as a Service (SaaS).
- Step 4:
- Provide an evaluation report on each organisation application and/or service. Setting out the overall migration strategy, and showing how a service would be migrated, what it would be migrated to and the operational costs. Timeline of events would also be layed out clearly and concisely to understand the full duration of the project and key milestones.
This four-step plan will lead to the following benefits:
- Early insights into running costs
- Any new solutions created went straight into Microsoft Azure
- Total cost reduced by moving applications into PaaS or SaaS
- More time given to staff to increase productivity instead of managing the datacentre
- Having an optimised, organisation-focussed, migration plan and Cloud strategy allows the organisation to see the full potential of what they could achieve
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