cloud migration case study

10 Important Cloud Migration Case Studies You Need to Know

Aug 1, 2019 | Engineering

For most businesses considering cloud migration, the move is filled with promise and potential. Scalability, flexibility, reliability, cost-effectiveness, improved performance and disaster recovery, and simpler, faster deployment — what’s not to like? 

It’s important to understand that cloud platform benefits come alongside considerable challenges, including the need to improve availability and latency, auto-scale orchestration, manage tricky connections, scale the development process effectively, and address cloud security challenges. While advancements in virtualization and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes) are helping many businesses solve these challenges, cloud migration is no simple matter. 

That’s why, when considering your organization’s cloud migration strategy, it’s beneficial to look at case studies and examples from other companies’ cloud migration experiences. Why did they do it? How did they go about it? What happened? What benefits did they see, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing for these businesses? Most importantly, what lessons did they learn — and what can you learn from them? 

With that in mind, Distillery has put together 10 cloud migration case studies your business can learn from. While most of the case studies feature companies moving from on-premise, bare metal data centers to cloud, we also look at companies moving from cloud to cloud, cloud to multi-cloud, and even off the cloud. Armed with all these lessons, ideas, and strategies, you’ll feel readier than ever to make the cloud work for your business.

Challenges for Cloud Adoption: Is Your Organization Ready to Scale and Be Cloud-first?

We examine several of these case studies from a more technical perspective in our white paper on Top Challenges for Cloud Adoption in 2019 . In this white paper, you’ll learn:

• Why cloud platform development created scaling challenges for businesses
• How scaling fits into the big picture of the Cloud Maturity Framework
• Why advancements in virtualization and containerization have helped businesses solve these scaling challenges
• How companies like Betabrand, Shopify, Spotify, Evernote, Waze, and others have solved these scaling challenges while continuing to innovate their businesses and provide value to users

#1 Betabrand : Bare Metal to Cloud

Betabrand (est. 2005) is a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced retail clothing e-commerce company that designs, manufactures, and releases limited-quantity products via its website. 

Migration Objective 

The company struggled with the maintenance difficulties and lack of scalability of the bare metal infrastructure supporting their operations. 

Planning for and adding capacity took too much time and added costs. They also needed the ability to better handle website traffic surges.

Migration Strategy and Results 

In anticipation of 2017’s Black Friday increased web traffic, Betabrand migrated to a Google Cloud infrastructure managed by Kubernetes (Google Kubernetes Engine, or GKE). They experienced no issues related to the migration, and Black Friday 2017 was a success. 

By Black Friday 2018, early load testing and auto-scaling cloud infrastructure helped them to handle peak loads with zero issues. The company hasn’t experienced a single outage since migrating to the cloud.

Key Takeaways

• With advance planning, cloud migration can be a simple process. Betabrand’s 2017 on-premise to cloud migration proved smooth and simple. In advance of actual migration, they created multiple clusters in GKE and performed several test migrations, thereby identifying the right steps for a successful launch.
• Cloud streamlines load testing. Betabrand was able to quickly create a replica of its production services that they could use in load testing. Tests revealed poorly performing code paths that would only be revealed by heavy loads. They were able to fix the issues before Black Friday. 
• Cloud’s scalability is key to customer satisfaction. As a fast-growing e-commerce business, Betabrand realized they couldn’t afford the downtime or delays of bare metal. Their cloud infrastructure scales automatically, helping them avoid issues and keep customers happy. This factor alone underlines the strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations like Betabrand. 

#2 Shopify : Cloud to Cloud

Shopify (est. 2006) provides a proprietary e-commerce software platform upon which businesses can build and run online stores and retail point-of-sale (POS) systems. 

Shopify wanted to ensure they were using the best tools possible to support the evolution needed to meet increasing customer demand. Though they’d always been a cloud-based organization, building and running their e-commerce cloud with their own data centers, they sought to capitalize on the container-based cloud benefits of immutable infrastructure to provide better support to their customers. Specifically, they wanted to ensure predictable, repeatable builds and deployments; simpler and more robust rollbacks; and elimination of configuration management drift. 

By building out their cloud with Google, building a “Shop Mover” database migration tool, and leveraging Docker containers and Kubernetes, Shopify has been able to transform its data center to better support customers’ online shops, meeting all their objectives. For Shopify customers, the increasingly scalable, resilient applications mean improved consistency, reliability, and version control.

• Immutable infrastructure vastly improves deployments. Since cloud servers are never modified post-deployment, configuration drift — in which undocumented changes to servers can cause them to diverge from one another and from the originally deployed configuration — is minimized or eliminated. This means deployments are easier, simpler, and more consistent.
• Scalability is central to meeting the changing needs of dynamic e-commerce businesses. Shopify is home to online shops like Kylie Cosmetics, which hosts flash sales that can sell out in 20 seconds. Shopify’s cloud-to-cloud migration helped its servers flex to meet fluctuating demand, ensuring that commerce isn’t slowed or disrupted.

#3 Spotify: Bare Metal to Cloud

Spotify (est. 2006) is a media services provider primarily focused on its audio-streaming platform, which lets users search for, listen to, and share music and podcasts.

Spotify’s leadership and engineering team agreed: The company’s massive in-house data centers were difficult to provision and maintain, and they didn’t directly serve the company’s goal of being the “best music service in the world.” They wanted to free up Spotify’s engineers to focus on innovation. They started planning for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2015, hoping to minimize disruption to product development, and minimize the cost and complexity of hybrid operation. 

Spotify invested two years pre-migration in preparing, assigning a dedicated Spotify/Google cloud migration team to oversee the effort. Ultimately, they split the effort into two parts, services and data, which took a year apiece. For services migration, engineering teams moved services to the cloud in focused two-week sprints, pausing on product development. For data migration, teams were allowed to choose between “forklifting” or rewriting options to best fit their needs. Ultimately, Spotify’s on-premise to cloud migration succeeded in increasing scalability while freeing up developers to innovate. 

• Gaining stakeholder buy-in is crucial. Spotify was careful to consult its engineers about the vision. Once they could see what their jobs looked like in the future, they were all-in advocates. 
• Migration preparation shouldn’t be rushed. Spotify’s dedicated migration team took the time to investigate various cloud strategies and build out the use case demonstrating the benefits of cloud computing to the business. They carefully mapped all dependencies. They also worked with Google to identify and orchestrate the right cloud strategies and solutions. 
• Focus and dedication pay huge dividends. Spotify’s dedicated migration team kept everything on track and in focus, making sure everyone involved was aware of past experience and lessons already learned. In addition, since engineering teams were fully focused on the migration effort, they were able to complete it more quickly, reducing the disruption to product development.

#4 Evernote : Bare Metal to Cloud

Evernote (est. 2008) is a collaborative, cross-platform note-taking and task management application that helps users capture, organize, and track ideas, tasks, and deadlines.

Evernote, which had maintained its own servers and network since inception, was feeling increasingly limited by its infrastructure. It was difficult to scale, and time-consuming and expensive to maintain. They wanted more flexibility, as well as to improve Evernote’s speed, reliability, security, and disaster recovery planning. To minimize service disruption, they hoped to conduct the on-premise to cloud migration as efficiently as possible. 

Starting in 2016, Evernote used an iterative approach : They built a strawman based on strategic decisions, tested its viability, and rapidly iterated. They then settled on a cloud migration strategy that used a phased cutover approach, enabling them to test parts of the migration before committing. They also added important levels of security by using GCP service accounts , achieving “encryption at rest,” and improving disaster recovery processes. Evernote successfully migrated 5 billion notes and 5 billion attachments to GCP in only 70 days. 

• Cloud migration doesn’t have to happen all at once. You can migrate services in phases or waves grouped by service or user. Evernote’s phased cutover approach allowed for rollback points if things weren’t going to according to plan, reducing migration risk. 
• Ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Cloud security challenges may require extra focus in your cloud migration effort. Evernote worked with Google to create the additional security layers their business required. GCP service accounts can be customized and configured to use built-in public/private key pairs managed and rotated daily by Google.
• Cloud capabilities can improve disaster recovery planning. Evernote wanted to ensure that they would be better prepared to quickly recover customer data in the event of a disaster. Cloud’s reliable, redundant, and robust data backups help make this possible. 

#5 Etsy : Bare Metal to Cloud

Etsy (est. 2005) is a global e-commerce platform that allows sellers to build and run online stores selling handmade and vintage items and crafting supplies.

Etsy had maintained its own infrastructure from inception. In 2018, they decided to re-evaluate whether cloud was right for the company’s future. In particular, they sought to improve site performance, engineering efficiency, and UX. They also wanted to ensure long-term scalability and sustainability, as well as to spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time executing strategy.

Migration Strategy and Results

Etsy undertook a detailed vendor selection process , ultimately identifying GCP as the right choice for their cloud migration strategy . Since they’d already been running their own Kubernetes cluster inside their data center, they already had a partial solution for deploying to GKE. They initially deployed in a hybrid environment (private data center and GKE), providing redundancy, reducing risk, and allowing them to perform A/B testing. They’re on target to complete the migration and achieve all objectives. 

Key Takeaways 

• Business needs and technology fit should be periodically reassessed. While bare metal was the right choice for Etsy when it launched in 2005, improvements in infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) made cloud migration the right choice in 2018.
• Detailed analysis can help businesses identify the right cloud solution for their needs. Etsy took a highly strategic approach to assessment that included requirements definition, RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) matrices, and architectural reviews. This helped them ensure that their cloud migration solution would genuinely help them achieve all their goals.
• Hybrid deployment can be effective for reducing cloud migration risk. Dual deployment on their private data center and GKE was an important aspect of Etsy’s cloud migration strategy. 

#6 Waze : Cloud to Multi-cloud

Waze (est. 2006; acquired by Google in 2013) is a GPS-enabled navigation application that uses real-time user location data and user-submitted reports to suggest optimized routes.

Though Waze moved to the cloud very early on, their fast growth quickly led to production issues that caused painful rollbacks, bottlenecks, and other complications. They needed to find a way to get faster feedback to users while mitigating or eliminating their production issues.  

Waze decided to run an active-active architecture across multiple cloud providers — GCP and Amazon Web Services (AWS) — to improve the resiliency of their production systems. This means they’re better-positioned to survive a DNS DDOS attack, or a regional or global failure. An open source continuous delivery platform called Spinnaker helps them deploy software changes while making rollbacks easy and reliable. Spinnaker makes it easy for Waze’s engineers to deploy across both cloud platforms, using a consistent conceptual model that doesn’t rely on detailed knowledge of either platform .  

• Some business models may be a better fit for multiple clouds. Cloud strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Waze’s stability and reliability depends on avoiding downtime, deploying quick fixes to bugs, and ensuring the resiliency of their production systems. Running on two clouds at once helps make it all happen. 
• Your engineers don’t necessarily have to be cloud experts to deploy effectively. Spinnaker streamlines multi-cloud deployment for Waze such that developers can focus on development, rather than on becoming cloud experts. 

Deploying software more frequently doesn’t have to mean reduced stability/reliability. Continuous delivery can get you to market faster, improving quality while reducing risk and cost.

#7 AdvancedMD : Bare Metal to Cloud

AdvancedMD (est. 1999) is a software platform used by medical professionals to manage their practices, securely share information, and manage workflow, billing, and other tasks. 

AdvancedMD was being spun off from its parent company, ADP; to operate independently, it had to move all its data out of ADP’s data center. Since they handle highly sensitive, protected patient data that must remain available to practitioners at a moment’s notice, security and availability were top priorities. They sought an affordable, easy-to-manage, and easy-to-deploy solution that would scale to fit their customers’ changing needs while keeping patient data secure and available.

AdvancedMD’s on-premise to cloud migration would avoid the need to hire in-house storage experts, save them and their customers money, ensure availability, and let them quickly flex capacity to accommodate fluctuating needs. It also offered the simplicity and security they needed. Since AdvancedMD was already running NetApp storage arrays in its data center, it was easy to use NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP to move their data to AWS. ONTAP also provides the enterprise-level data protection and encryption they require.

• Again, ensuring data security in the cloud may require extra steps. Though cloud has improved or mitigated some security concerns (e.g., vulnerable OS dependencies, long-lived compromised servers), hackers have turned their focus to the vulnerabilities that remain. Thus, your cloud migration strategy may need extra layers of controls (e.g., permissions, policies, encryption) to address these cloud security challenges.
• When service costs are a concern, cloud’s flexibility may help. AdvancedMD customers are small to mid-sized budget-conscious businesses. Since cloud auto-scales, AdvancedMD never pays for more cloud infrastructure than they’re actually using. That helps them keep customer pricing affordable.

#8 Dropbox : Cloud to Hybrid

Dropbox (est. 2007) is a file hosting service that provides cloud storage and file synchronization solutions for customers.

Dropbox had developed its business by using the cloud — specifically, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) — to house data while keeping metadata housed on-premise. Over time, they began to fear they’d become overly dependent on Amazon: not only were costs increasing as their storage needs grew, but Amazon was also planning a similar service offering, Amazon WorkDocs. Dropbox decided to take back their storage to help them reduce costs, increase control, and maintain their competitive edge. 

While the task of moving all that data to an in-house infrastructure was daunting, the company decided it was worth it — at least in the US (Dropbox assessed that in Europe, AWS is still the best fit). Dropbox designed in-house and built a massive network of new-breed machines orchestrated by software built with an entirely new programming language, moving about 90% of its files back to its own servers . Dropbox’s expanded in-house capabilities have enabled them to offer Project Infinite, which provides desktop users with universal compatibility and unlimited real-time data access.

• On-premise infrastructure may still be right for some businesses. Since Dropbox’s core product relies on fast, reliable data access and storage, they need to ensure consistently high performance at a sustainable cost. Going in-house required a huge investment, but improved performance and reduced costs may serve them better in the long run. Once Dropbox understood that big picture, they had to recalculate the strategic importance of cloud computing to their organization.  
• Size matters. As Wired lays out in its article detailing the move , cloud businesses are not charities. There’s always going to be margin somewhere. If a business is big enough — like Dropbox — it may make sense to take on the difficulties of building a massive in-house network. But it’s a huge risk for businesses that aren’t big enough, or whose growth may stall.

#9 GitLab : Cloud to Cloud

GitLab (est. 2011) is an open core company that provides a single application supporting the entire DevOps life cycle for more than 100,000 organizations. 

GitLab’s core application enables software development teams to collaborate on projects in real time, avoiding both handoffs and delays. GitLab wanted to improve performance and reliability, accelerating development while making it as seamless, efficient, and error-free as possible. While they acknowledged that Microsoft Azure had been a great cloud provider, they strongly believed that GCP’s Kubernetes was the future, calling it “a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible.” 

In 2018, GitLab migrated from Azure to GCP so that GitLab could run as a cloud-native application on GKE. They used their own Geo product to migrate the data, initially mirroring the data between Azure and GCP. Post-migration, GitLab reported improved performance (including fewer latency spikes) and a 61% improvement in availability.    

• Containers are seen by many as the future of DevOps. GitLab was explicit that they view Kubernetes as the future. Indeed, containers provide notable benefits, including a smaller footprint, predictability, and the ability to scale up and down in real time. For GitLab’s users, the company’s cloud-to-cloud migration makes it easier to get started with using Kubernetes for DevOps.
• Improved stability and availability can be a big benefit of cloud migration. In GitLab’s case, mean-time between outage events pre-migration was 1.3 days. Excluding the first day post-migration, they’re up to 12 days between outage events. Pre-migration, they averaged 32 minutes of downtime weekly; post-migration, they’re down to 5. 

#10 Cordant Group : Bare Metal to Hybrid

The Cordant Group (est. 1957) is a global social enterprise that provides a range of services and solutions, including recruitment, security, cleaning, health care, and technical electrical.

Over the years, the Cordant Group had grown tremendously, requiring an extensive IT infrastructure to support their vast range of services. While they’d previously focused on capital expenses, they’d shifted to looking at OpEx, or operational expenses — which meant cloud’s “pay as you go” model made increasing sense. It was also crucial to ensure ease of use and robust data backups.

They began by moving to a virtual private cloud on AWS , but found that the restriction to use Windows DFS for file server resource management was creating access problems. NetApp Cloud ONTAP, a software storage appliance that runs on AWS server and storage resources, solved the issue. File and storage management is easier than ever, and backups are robust, which means that important data restores quickly. The solution also monitors resource costs over time, enabling more accurate planning that drives additional cost savings. 

• Business and user needs drive cloud needs. That’s why cloud strategies will absolutely vary based on a company’s unique needs. The Cordant Group needed to revisit its cloud computing strategy when users were unable to quickly access the files they needed. In addition, with such a diverse user group, ease of use had to be a top priority.
• Cloud ROI ultimately depends on how your business measures ROI. The strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations is specific to each organization. Cloud became the right answer for the Cordant Group when OpEx became the company’s dominant lens. 

Which Cloud Migration Strategy Is Right for You?

As these 10 diverse case studies show, cloud strategies are not one-size-fits all. Choosing the right cloud migration strategy for your business depends on several factors, including your:

• Goals. What business results do you want to achieve as a result of the migration? How does your business measure ROI? What problems are you trying to solve via your cloud migration strategy? 
• Business model. What is your current state? What are your core products/services and user needs, and how are they impacted by how and where data is stored? What are your development and deployment needs, issues, and constraints? What are your organization’s cost drivers? How is your business impacted by lack of stability or availability? Can you afford downtime? 
• Security needs. What are your requirements regarding data privacy, confidentiality, encryption, identity and access management, and regulatory compliance? Which cloud security challenges pose potential problems for your business?
• Scaling needs. Do your needs and usage fluctuate? Do you expect to grow or shrink? 
• Disaster recovery and business continuity needs. What are your needs and capabilities in this area? How might your business be impacted in the event of a major disaster — or even a minor service interruption? 
• Technical expertise. What expertise do you need to run and innovate your core business? What expertise do you have in-house? Are you allocating your in-house expertise to the right efforts? 
• Team focus and capacity. How much time and focus can your team dedicate to the cloud migration effort? 
• Timeline. What business needs constrain your timeline? What core business activities must remain uninterrupted? How much time can you allow for planning and testing your cloud migration strategy? 

Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive. These questions are only a starting point. But getting started — with planning, better understanding your goals and drivers, and assessing potential technology fit — is the most important step of any cloud migration process. We hope these 10 case studies have helped to get you thinking in the right direction. 

While the challenges of cloud migration are considerable, the right guidance, planning, and tools can lead you to the cloud strategies and solutions that will work best for your business. So don’t delay: Take that first step to helping your business reap the potential advantages and benefits of cloud computing. 

Ready to take the next step on your cloud journey? As a Certified Google Cloud Technology Partner , Distillery is here to help. Download our white paper on top challenges for cloud adoption to get tactical and strategic about using cloud to transform your business.  

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7 best case-studies for migrating from on-premise to cloud.

For most businesses considering cloud migration, it’s essential to understand that cloud platform benefits come alongside considerable challenges, including improving availability and latency, auto-scale orchestration, managing tricky connections, scaling the development process effectively, and addressing cloud security challenges.

A transformation example when moving from On-premise to Cloud

#1 Betabrand: Bare Metal to Cloud

CloudBetabrand  (est. 2005) is a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced retail clothing e-commerce company that designs, manufactures, and releases limited-quantity products via its website.

– Migration objective 

The company struggled with the maintenance difficulties and lack of scalability of the bare metal infrastructure supporting their operations. Planning for and adding capacity took too much time and added costs. They also needed the ability to handle website traffic surges better.

– Key Takeaways

• With planning, cloud migration can be a simple process. Betabrand’s 2017 on-premise to cloud migration proved smooth and simple. Before actual migration, they created multiple clusters in GKE and performed several test migrations, identifying the right steps for a successful launch.
• Cloud streamlines load testing.  Betabrand was able to quickly create a replica of its production services that they could use in load testing. Tests revealed poorly performing code paths that would only be revealed by heavy loads. They could fix the issues before Black Friday.
• Cloud’s scalability is key to customer satisfaction.  As a fast-growing e-commerce business, Betabrand realized they couldn’t afford the downtime or delays of bare metal. Their cloud infrastructure scales automatically, helping them avoid issues and keep customers happy. This factor alone underlines the strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations like Betabrand.

#2 Spotify: Bare Metal to Cloud

Spotify’s leadership and engineering team agreed: The company’s massive in-house data centers were difficult to provision and maintain, and they didn’t directly serve the company’s goal of being the “best music service in the world.” They wanted to free up Spotify’s engineers to focus on innovation. They started planning for migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2015, hoping to minimize disruption to product development and minimize the cost and complexity of hybrid operation.

• Gaining stakeholder buy-in is crucial.  Spotify was careful to consult its engineers about the vision. Once they could see what their jobs looked like in the future, they were all-in advocates.
• Migration preparation shouldn’t be rushed.  Spotify’s dedicated migration team took the time to investigate various cloud strategies and build out the use case showing the benefits of cloud computing to the business. They carefully mapped all dependencies. They also worked with Google to identify and orchestrate the right cloud strategies and solutions.
• Focus and dedication pay huge dividends.  Spotify’s dedicated migration team kept everything on track and in focus, making sure everyone involved was aware of experience and lessons already learned. In addition, since engineering teams were fully focused on the migration effort, they could complete it more quickly, reducing the disruption to product development

#3 Waze: Cloud to Multi-cloud

Waze (est. 2006; acquired by Google in 2013) is a GPS-enabled navigation application that uses real-time user location data and user-submitted reports to suggest optimized routes.

Though Waze moved to the cloud very early on, their fast growth quickly led to production issues that caused painful rollbacks, bottlenecks, and other complications. They needed to get faster feedback to users while mitigating or eliminating their production issues.

• Some business models may be a better fit for multiple clouds.  Cloud strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Waze’s stability and reliability depend on avoiding downtime, deploying quick fixes to bugs, and ensuring the resiliency of their production systems. Running on two clouds at once helps make it all happen.
• Your engineers don’t have to be cloud experts to deploy effectively. Spinnaker streamlines multi-cloud deployment for Waze such that developers can focus on development, rather than on becoming cloud experts.
• Deploying software more frequently doesn’t have to mean reduced stability/reliability c ontinuous delivery can get you to market faster, improving quality while reducing risk and cost.

#4 Dropbox: Cloud to Hybrid

Dropbox had developed its business by using the cloud — specifically, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) — to house data while keeping metadata housed on-premise. Over time, they feared they’d become overly dependent on Amazon: not only were costs increasing as their storage needs grew, but Amazon was also planning a similar service offering, Amazon WorkDocs. Dropbox took back their storage to help them reduce costs, increase control, and maintain their competitive edge.

• On-premise infrastructure may still be right for some businesses.  Since Dropbox’s core product relies on fast, reliable data access and storage, they need to ensure consistently high performance at a sustainable cost. Going in-house required an enormous investment, but improved performance and reduced costs may serve them better in the long run. Once Dropbox understood that big picture, they had to recalculate the strategic importance of cloud computing to their organization.
• Size matters.  As  Wired  lays out in  its article detailing the move , cloud businesses are not charities. There’s always going to be a margin, a margin somewhere. If a business is big enough — like Dropbox — it may make sense to take on the difficulties of building a massive in-house network. But tension enormous risk, an enormous risk for businesses that aren’t big enough, or whose growth may stall.

#5 GitLab: Cloud to Cloud

GitLab’s core application enables software development teams to collaborate on projects in real time, avoiding both handoffs and delays. GitLab wanted to improve performance and reliability, accelerating development while making it as seamless, efficient, and error-free as possible. While they acknowledged Microsoft Azure had been a great cloud provider, they strongly believed that GCP’s Kubernetes were the future, calling it “a technology that makes reliability at massive scale possible.”

• Containers are seen by many as the future of DevOps.  GitLab was explicit that they view Kubernetes as the future.   Indeed, containers provide notable benefits, including a smaller footprint, predictability, and the ability to scale up and down in real time. For GitLab’s users, the company’s cloud-to-cloud migration makes it easier to get started with using Kubernetes for DevOps.
• An enormous benefit, improved stability and availability can be an enormous benefit of cloud migration. In GitLab’s case, mean-time between outage events pre-migration was 1.3 days. Excluding the first day post-migration, they’re up to 12 days between outage events. Pre-migration, they averaged 32 minutes of downtime weekly; post-migration, they’re down to 5.

#6 Cordant Group: Bare Metal to Hybrid

– Migration objective

Over the years, the Cordant Group had grown tremendously, requiring an extensive IT infrastructure to support their vast range of services. While they’d previously focused on capital expenses, they’d shifted to looking at OpEx, or operational expenses — which meant cloud’s “pay as you go” model made increasing sense. It was also crucial to ensure ease of use and robust data backups.

• Business and user needs drive cloud needs.  That’s why cloud strategies will absolutely vary based on a company’s unique needs. The Cordant Group needed to revisit its cloud computing strategy when users were unable to quickly access the files they needed. In addition, with such a diverse user group, ease of use had to be a top priority.
• Cloud ROI ultimately depends on how your business measures ROI.  The strategic importance of cloud computing in business organizations is specific to each organization. Cloud became the right answer for the Cordant Group when OpEx became the company’s dominant lens.

#7 Shopify: Cloud to Cloud

Shopify wanted to ensure they were using the best tools possible to support the evolution needed to meet increasing customer demand. Though they’d always been a cloud-based organization, building and running their e-commerce cloud with their own data centers, they sought to capitalize on the container-based cloud benefits of immutable infrastructure to provide better support to their customers. Specifically, they wanted to ensure predictable, repeatable builds and deployments; simpler and more robust rollbacks; and elimination of configuration management drift.

• Immutable infrastructure vastly improves deployments.  Since cloud servers are never modified post-deployment, configuration drift — in which undocumented changes to servers can cause them to diverge from one another and from the originally deployed configuration — is minimized or eliminated. This means deployments are easier, simpler, and more consistent.
• Scalability is central to meeting the changing needs of dynamic e-commerce businesses.  Shopify is home to online shops like Kylie Cosmetics, which hosts flash sales that can sell out in 20 seconds. Shopify’s cloud-to-cloud migration helped its servers flex to meet fluctuating demand, ensuring that commerce isn’t slowed or disrupted.

Which Cloud Migration Strategy Is Right for You?

As these 7 case studies show, cloud strategies are not one-size-fits all. Choosing the right cloud migration strategy for your business depends on several factors, including your:

• Goals. What business results do you want to achieve because of the migration? How does your business measure ROI? What problems are you trying to solve via your cloud migration strategy?
• Business model.  What is your current state? What are your core products/services and user needs, and how are they affected by how and where data is stored? What are your development and deployment needs, issues, and constraints? What are your organization’s cost drivers? How is your business affected by lack of stability or availability? Can you afford downtime?
• Security needs.  What are your requirements regarding data privacy, confidentiality, encryption, identity and access management, and regulatory compliance? Which cloud security challenges pose potential problems for your business?
• Scaling needs.  Do your needs and usage fluctuate? Do you expect to grow or shrink?
• Disaster recovery and business continuity needs. What are your needs and capabilities in this area? How might your business be affected in the event of a major disaster — or even a minor service interruption?
• Technical expertise.  What expertise do you need to run and innovate your core business? What expertise do you have in-house? Are you allocating your in-house expertise to the right efforts?
• Team focus and capacity.  How much time and focus can your team dedicate to the cloud migration effort?
• Timeline.  What business needs to constrain your timeline? What core business activities must remain uninterrupted? How much time can you allow for planning and testing your cloud migration strategy?

In short, with the list of questions above and 7 case studies of companies’ successful cloud migrations. You can start with a plan, understanding the goals and desires of your business. Learn the right tools to lead you to cloud strategies and solutions that will work best for your business.

Ready to take the next step on your cloud journey?

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Chris Stokel-Walker

Case studies in cloud migration: netflix, pinterest, and symantec.

In October 2008, Neil Hunt, chief product officer at Netflix, gathered a meeting of a dozen or so of his engineering staffers in The Towering Inferno, the secluded top-floor meeting room at Netflix’s Los Gatos, CA headquarters. The room, which Netflix CEO Reed Hastings occasionally commandeers as his personal office, is away from the main office hustle and bustle of the start-up company, up a flight of stairs and across an outdoor wooden walkway up on the building’s rooftop—the ideal place for big-picture thinking.

Big thoughts were needed, because Netflix had a problem: its backend client architecture was, to put none too fine a term on it, crumbling more than the Colosseum and leaning more than the Tower of Pisa.

“We kept having issues with connections and threads,” Hunt  recalled  at an industry conference in Las Vegas, NV, six years later. “At one point we upgraded the machine to a fantastic $5 million box and it crashed immediately because the extra capacity on the thread pools meant we ran out of connection pools more quickly.”

It was an unenviable position to be in for the firm, which had introduced online streaming of its vast video library the year before. Netflix had just partnered with Microsoft to get its app on the Xbox 360, and had agreed to terms with the manufacturers of Blu-ray players and TV set-top boxes to service their customers. Millions of potential users of a new, game-changing technology were about to encounter what we now know as the multi-billion dollar industry of online video streaming that would transform Netflix from a failing company that mailed DVDs to movie buffs into a television and movie studio that rivaling some of Hollywood’s biggest names.

But, back in 2008, with a backend that couldn’t cope, the public wasn’t about to encounter anything—unless Netflix made some changes.

There were two points of failure in the physical technology, Hunt explained to the conference audience in Las Vegas: The disk array that ran Netflix’s database—a single Oracle database on an array of Blade webservers—and the single box that talked to it.

“We knew we were approaching a point where we needed to make this redundant,” said Hunt. But Netflix hadn’t yet forked out the cash for second data center that would alleviate the problem. “We were vulnerable to those single points of failure.”

“Let’s rethink this completely, go back to first principles, and think about doing it in the cloud.”

That much became abundantly clear in 2008 when the company pushed a piece of firmware to the disk array. It corrupted Netflix’s database, and the company had to spend three days scrambling to recover. (One contemporary news story on the outage—and the customer outrage it sparked—noted that some customers even went back to Blockbuster, which Netflix had made seem decrepit, for their DVDs.) “That wasn’t a total catastrophe because most customers weren’t reliant on the system being up to get value from the service,” explained Hunt—but as Netflix’s DVD mailing arm wound down and its new streaming service caught on, it would become a problem.

“We thought: ‘Let’s rethink this completely, go back to first principles, and think about doing it in the cloud’,” said Hunt.

Over the course of several meetings in The Towering Inferno, Hunt and his team thrashed out a plan that would ensure that database corruption—and the many other issues with connections and threads that seemed to plague the company back in 2008—would never happen again. They’d move to the cloud.

Whether companies are looking to run their applications serving millions of users or to underpin the databases and file servers of multinational businesses, the cloud provides a low-cost, flexible way to ensure reliable IT resources. Firms don’t need to worry about the physical upkeep of their own private data centers storing information; they can build out capacity as and when it’s needed, lowering costs and increasing their adaptability—important features for a young startup with unpredictable (and potentially limitless) growth. It has been a recent boon, born out by technological innovation, that helps power hundreds of thousands of companies, big and small, across the globe.

For Netflix, the move to the cloud proved a prescient decision: between December 2007 and December 2015, the number of hours of content streamed on Netflix increased one thousand times, and the company had eight times as many people signed up to the service at the end of its cloud migration process as it did at the start. Cloud infrastructure was able to stretch to meet this expanding demand while traditional server racks in a data center were not able to (the number of requests per month called through Netflix’s API  outstripped  the capacity of its traditional data center near the end of 2010). It also proved to be a major cost-saving move.

But at the same time, the cloud was still an unproven, young technology. Amazon, the current leader in cloud computing, had only been offering their Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure products since 2006. Caution was required. Netflix started small, moving over a single page onto AWS to make sure the new system worked. “It’s nicely symbolic,” said Hunt. “We recognised that along the way we probably need to hire some new skills, bring in some new talent, and rethink our organisation.” The company chose AWS over alternative public cloud suppliers because of its breadth of features and its scale, as well as the broader variants of APIs that AWS offered.

“When Netflix made the decision to go all-in on the cloud, most people were barely aware the cloud existed.”

Today, the cloud is many companies’ first choice when it comes to storing data and serving their customers. AWS is a $12 billion company, four times bigger than it was in 2013. It has—and has long had—a 40% market share in the public cloud sector, much more than the combined market share of Microsoft, Google and IBM’s cloud offerings combined,  according to data  collated by Synergy Research Group. Those that aren’t utilising the cloud often feel they want to, and are frustrated when they can’t: Four in 10 businesses have critical company data trapped in legacy systems that can’t be accessed or linked to cloud services, according to a survey by market research company Vanson Bourne for commercial software company Snaplogic, while three in four say that their organization misses out on opportunities because of disconnected data. Vendors’ revenue from the sales of infrastructure products—including server, storage and Ethernet switches—for cloud IT topped $8 billion in the first quarter of 2017, according to analysts IDC.

But none of that was the case when Netflix started its great migration, nor was it true when Ruslan Meshenberg started at Netflix in January 2011, two years into Netflix’s big move. As one of the first companies to move its services into the cloud, Netflix was literally writing the rulebook for many of the tasks it was undertaking. Meshenberg was thrown in at the deep end.

“That was the very first set of objectives I was given,” he explains. “A complete data-center-to-cloud migration for a core set of platform services. Day one.”

It involved a lot of outside the box thinking—and plenty of trailblazing. “When Netflix made the decision to go all-in on the cloud, most people were barely aware the cloud existed,” he explains. “We had to find solutions to a lot of problems, at a time when there were not a lot of standard, off-the-shelf solutions.”

And the problems, when tackling such an enormous task as the migration of a company the size of Netflix, were numerous—particularly for a team used to the mindset that their system operated in a physical data center.

“When you’re operating in a data center,” says Meshenberg, “you know all of your servers. Your applications are running only on a particular set of hardware units.” The goal for the company in a physical data center is a simple one: keep the hardware running at all times, at all costs. That’s not the case with the cloud. Your software runs on ephemeral instances that aren’t guaranteed to be up for any particular duration, or at any particular time. “You can either lament that ephemerality and try to counteract it, or you can try and embrace it and say: ‘I’m going to build a reliable, available system on top of something that is not.’”

Which is where Netflix’s famed  Simian Army  comes in. You have to build a system that can fail—in part—while keeping up as a whole. But in order to figure out if your systems have that ability baked into their design, you need to test it.

Netflix built a tool that would self-sabotage its system, and christened it Chaos Monkey. It would be unleashed on the cloud system, wreaking havoc, bringing down aspects of the system as it rampaged around. The notion might seem self-defeating, but it had a purpose. “We decided to simulate the conditions of a crash to make sure that our engineers can architect, write and test software that’s resilient in light of these failures,” explains Meshenberg.

In its early days, Chaos Monkey’s tantrums in the cloud were a dispiriting experience. “It was painful,” Meshenberg admits. “We didn’t have the best practices, and so many of our systems failed in production. But now, since our engineers have this built-in expectation that our systems will have to be tested by Chaos Monkey, in production they’re now writing their software using the best practices that can withstand such destructive testing.”

Even without Chaos Monkey, there were still early setbacks, including a significant outage across North America on Christmas Eve 2012 thanks to an AWS update to elastic load balancers that tipped Netflix offline—a chastening event. But the company adapted, and came through it. By 2015 all of Netflix’s systems—bar its customer and employee data management databases, and billing and payment components—had been migrated to AWS. It would take a little longer before Meshenberg’s team could celebrate a job complete, but the relatively bump-free path (and the easy scaling up of systems as Netflix’s customer base skyrocketed) vindicated the move.

“The crux of our decision to go into the cloud,” says Meshenberg, was a simple one: “It wasn’t core to our business to build and operate data centers. It’s not something our users get value from. Our users get value from enjoying their entertainment. We decided to focus on that and push the underlying infrastructure to a cloud provider like AWS.”

For Netflix, dipping their toe into the water of cloud computing wasn’t an option. They had to dive in headfirst.

That said, making the leap was a brave move—not least given that, particularly when Netflix began its migration in 2009 and even when Meshenberg joined the company in 2011, cloud storage was still a relatively unknown technology in the Valley, and an unknown term to the general public. (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)  held  just its fourth ever international conference on cloud computing in Washington DC in 2011; technology analysts Gartner were still able, back in 2011, to  publish  a $2,000 “Hype Cycle” report explaining a technology that was on the rise.) Though those in the know understood the benefits of migrating to the cloud, and had a hunch that the general consensus would follow them, early adopters were still just that—pioneers pushing out the boundaries for the technology.

Going all-in on the cloud required betting on the future—and hoping that others would follow. But for Netflix, dipping their toe into the water of cloud computing wasn’t an option. They had to dive in headfirst.

“We had little doubt that cloud was the future,” explains Meshenberg. “If it was, it didn’t make sense to hedge our bets and straddle both worlds, because that would mean we would lose the focus of getting something done completely to the end.”

There was another factor in the decision for Netflix, too: scalability. “Our business was growing a lot faster than we would be able to build the capacity ourselves,” Meshenberg recalls. “Every time you grow your business your traffic grows by an order of magnitude, you have to rewrite the rules. The thing that worked for you at a smaller scale may no longer work at the bigger scale. We made a bet that the cloud would be a sufficient means in terms of capacity and capability to support our business, and the rest was figuring out the technical details of how.”

For Raj Patel, considering anything but the cloud was never really an option. Head of Cloud Engineering at Pinterest from 2014–2016, Patel joined a company that still had to engineer another move: from Amazon Web Service’s legacy cloud to a next-generation cloud system. “It wasn’t any different, frankly, than moving from a data center to the public cloud,” explains Patel. “We did a migration inside of Amazon.”

The move was one that some at the startup were wary of, even despite its benefits. “A cloud migration, in many cases, doesn’t necessarily get them anything,” says Patel. “The appeal has to be why they should do this before the five other things they were thinking about doing for their own group.”

At a small, nimble startup like Pinterest, time and resources are scarce, and an engineering team’s to-do list is as long as the sum of their collective arms. Getting people on-side with the cloud migration required deftness, discussion—and categorically not a top-down edict. It also required going person-to-person, winning small victories in support of the larger battle.

“You have to intuitively appeal or influence the motivations of an individual engineer to achieve your goal,” says Patel. “What I found was that at the earlier stages of the program I explicitly looked for folks that are early adopters or have a vested interest in doing that program or project, and you really focus on making them really successful. Then if the others see it they’ll get on board.”

Certain groups at Pinterest had pent-up frustrations with the older generation of Amazon’s cloud service, particularly when it same to the elasticity of potential future expansion. Data engineering-intensive applications ran up against walls with the old cloud server. Patel saw an in.

“We focused on those who would benefit the most,” he says, selling them on the idea of migrating over to a new cloud server, better equipped to deal with the developments they wanted to introduce. Patel’s team provided those early adopters with the tools to help them smoothly migrate over to the new cloud. That included embedding a consultant or solution engineer (rebranded “site reliability engineers” so as not to ruffle any feathers within the groups they joined) with each application team, who was able to provide the relevant tools and know-how to help ease the transition over to AWS. What the site reliability engineers from Patel’s team didn’t do, though, was impose any ideas or tools on the teams they joined.

"We focused on those who would benefit the most,” selling them on the idea of migrating over to a new cloud server, better equipped to deal with the developments they wanted to introduce.

“Any time you do a cloud migration—especially with engineers—there’s always this notion of: ‘Here’s my way of doing it, here’s your way of doing it: What’s the right way of doing it?’,” explains Patel. “If you had an outside group tell you this is the only way you’re going to do it, you’re going to run into a lot of friction.”

Rather, the teams worked collaboratively, engendering a sense of common purpose. Pinterest was, in truth, always going to make the move, and the company could have become forceful with its ideas, but Patel wanted a more consensual approach. “Their success is embedded with that application team,” says Patel. “Even though they might be talking about a central tool or approach, they’re perceived from the perspective of that application team.”

Like a pyramid scheme, the early adopters found success, and became proselytisers for the move. “When they talk to others at lunch, they say the migration is going really well; the guys doing it are really helpful, and it’s going just fantastic,” says Patel. “The next time you talk to the sceptics, they say: ‘Let’s go and do it.’”

At the same time, those systems that had successfully made the cloud-to-cloud migration were crowed about internally. Data democracy was crucial, says Patel, in getting across the message that the migration was something to be welcomed, not shunned. “We had important metrics about the progress we were making and would send it out to the whole engineering team to let them see it,” he explains. “People like data—engineers especially. They resonate with that progress.”

Six months later, Pinterest had transferred its backend to the more modern cloud system. The team held a party to celebrate the successful move, but truthfully, it was just another success for a company that has plenty of them.

“Think about it,” says Patel. “This was a company that was doubling or tripling in size every year. When I joined the company it was making $0 in revenue and the first year it was $100 million or something, then the next year something like three times that amount. That was the norm across the entire company. In some ways, it was just business as usual.”

When Patel moved to Symantec in April 2016 to become vice president for cloud platform engineering, things were far from business as usual.

“The magnitude of challenges are, I’d say, 5× with Symantec,” he explains. “That’s one of the things I’ve come to realize: While it’s interesting to talk about companies like Pinterest, Facebook or Instagram, their problem is already solved. They have some of the brightest engineers in the world, their applications are already designed for these cloud-type elastic architectures. In some ways, the challenge is not that interesting. But when you’re dealing with a 30-plus year-old company like Symantec, the challenge is a lot more interesting.”

For decades, Symantec had provided stability and assurance to customers—important, given its role as a security service. Unlike Pinterest, which was born in the cloud seven years ago, Symantec was founded in 1982, when computers were massive, hulking bits of hardware, hardwired to the wall. The company had been in business before the world wide web appeared as long as Pinterest has been in business, period. A publicly listed company—accountable to shareholders, with $3.6 billion of turnover—comes with more levels of hierarchy than a nimble, community-focused startup born in the Valley.

“There are more business units with general managers, instead of application teams,” explains Patel. “All those barriers are a lot more rigid in a larger enterprise than they are in the more nimble, engineering organisation approach you find in a startup.” There are also people who have been working in the company longer than some of Pinterest’s brightest young engineers—individuals who have decades of experience, and rightly should be listened to when they pass comment on the merits of such a move into the cloud. “Frankly, there were a lot of sceptics, and real architectural challenges in applications that simply have not been designed for the cloud,” says Patel. His work would end up closing down 27 separate data centers around the world and moving everything into the public cloud. The scale seemed almost insurmountable.

Even the business case for convincing staff at Symantec was more difficult; it simply wasn’t as easy an argument to make, because if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

“Your influencing job is probably 5× harder,” says Patel. “Because of the cultural transformation, you have to be a lot more convincing. You’re telling people to work differently which is very difficult, and sometimes the organization has the appetite to do those things, and sometimes they don’t.”

Much like Ruslan Meshenberg felt the need to win over his staff members, and just as Patel had to leverage the enthusiasm of early adopters at Pinterest to convince those who were less keen on taking the leap into the cloud, at Symantec Patel had to undergo a similar “hearts and minds” campaign.

Guided by Patel’s boss, the executive vice president of the sector, his team decided to show, not tell, fellow Symantec staffers about the benefits of cloud migration. “We took all the major classes of application and did a proof of concept for each one of them,” he explains. Patel’s team broke down the challenge, piece by piece, drawing up a technical feasibility study for each application, working with each group’s architect, building a proof of concept that could convince them such a move would work— “as opposed to saying: ‘We’re just going to run off this cliff and it’s going to work.’”

The attitude was a simple one: “Let’s remove the risk, and show that.”

It worked. Conviction built around the move; the only thing left to discuss was how exactly to handle the migration.

Big legacy companies planning a move to the cloud are faced with one of two options: They can go down the lift-and-shift path, or the fix-and-shift route.

The lift-and-shift route is the (comparatively) easy option. You take your pre-existing application as it presently works in a private data center, and make the minimum possible changes before moving it into the cloud. “I understand there’s going to be benefits to moving to the cloud, and I’m probably not going to realise most of them, but we’ll fix it later,” says Patel of the lift-and-shift approach.

Fix-and-shift is harder, but potentially more beneficial. You’re not just going to do the bare minimum work to ensure your application—which worked fine in an offline data center—will work in the cloud. You’re buying into the concept of moving to the cloud, fixing your culture along the way, and making it more adaptable to the new norm.

“A lot of the time what you’ll find is that traditional IT organisations tend to do lift-and-shift,” says Patel. “They’re taking the same thing they had in their private data centres and, whether it’s a corporate mandate or whatever, they say: ‘Let’s just go and move it to the cloud.’ They’re looking for roughly the same technical or organisational approaches to operating in the cloud before the cloud,” he adds. “And in my view, that’s why a lot of those efforts fail.”

It was the same choice that Neil Hunt and his team had considered back in The Towering Inferno conference room. “We could take the existing app, forklift it, and shove it into AWS, then start to chip away at it,” he explained. “That was unappealing. It would be easy to do but we’d bring along a lot of bad architecture and a lot of bad habits.”

Netflix’s second choice was equally unappealing at first glance, simply because of the scale of the task. “We would run our existing infrastructure, and side by side run our AWS infrastructure, and migrate one piece at a time, from one system to another.” As the cloud migration occurred, Netflix totally transformed. Its application also changed from a hulking, single monolithic application to a clutch of small microservices, each of which can be developed independent of the others. It recast the way the company thought about everything, completely changing the shape and makeup of the firm.

Years after Netflix’s brave decision to undergo the wholesale application and infrastructure refactor, Symantec came to the same decision: They’re fixing, then they’re shifting. Patel still has a way to go before he can breathe easily: The process has taken—and will take—time, but he’s hopeful about reaching the finish line that lingers temptingly on the horizon.

“I’ll personally feel a lot more excitement when we’re done here at Symantec, just because we’ll have done so much more organisationally,” he explains.

Patel already knows the jubilation that’s felt when you move an entire company into the cloud, and can’t wait to feel that again. For Ruslan Meshenberg, who had helped guide Netflix into the cloud without any major hitches, there was only one way to celebrate the achievement. It’s what Silicon Valley does best: Hold an amazing party.

“We had some fun, and we shared some battle stories,” says Meshenberg. The team shared a sense of achievement—personally and as a group. “Cloud migration involves every single person in a company, whether they’re engineering or not,” he adds.

Meshenberg, who had only known cloud migration in his time with the company, could move on from the project he was handed on the first day of his job, to task number two. It must’ve seemed easy-going in comparison, you’d think. “Relatively speaking,” he agrees — “but probably not less challenging. The only constant is change itself. Nothing stands still. We have to constantly re-evaluate our assumptions and ensure that our ecosystem evolves as well.”

“Cloud migration involves every single person in a company, whether they’re engineering or not.”

But Meshenberg still holds with him that sense of pride that his team and colleagues pulled off a major cloud migration without much of a hitch—and that they confounded the critics along the way, remaining ahead of the technical curve.

“When we went into the cloud we faced a lot of external scepticism, people saying this will never work, or that it may work but not for us,” he says. “It might not be secure enough, scalable enough—you name it.”

There’s a brief pause, a moment as Meshenberg collects his thoughts. Eventually, he comes out with 10 short words: “It was good to be able to get it done.”

About the author

Chris Stokel-Walker is a UK-based features journalist for The Economist , Bloomberg , the BBC, and Wired UK . His first book, YouTubers , was published in 2019, and his second, TikTok Boom, was published in July 2021.

Ray Oranges / Machas

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Cloud Computing, Cloud Migration

Strategizing Effective Cloud Migrations with an Example Case Study

• By CloudThat

According to Gartner, by the end of 2021, 70% of organizations worldwide have migrated at least some workloads to the public cloud. Also, Gartner has identified 6 important factors that can derail cloud migration strategies of companies have been identified and they are: Choosing a wrong cloud migration ally, rushed application assessments, setting the wrong emphasis, poor landing zone designs, dependency bottlenecks, and hidden indirect costs. This blog post decodes how CloudThat  has helped its clients to ensure a seamless and cost-effective cloud migration and helped them to meet their business objectives.

Introduction

As organizations scale, customer demand increases rapidly. To meet the increasing demands, organizations tend to opt for newer and advanced cloud technologies. Cloud Service providers are competing today to provide improved reliability and customer experience through their software applications. While adopting new cloud technologies is a challenge, adhering to the budget without compromising the security posture can prove to be next to impossible without an expert.   

CloudThat offers consulting and system integration services to our clients along with cloud migration manages services, and Well-Architected Review (WAR). CloudThat  ensures cloud-delivered systems adhere to the security requirements and compliance standards expected by the customers in a multi-cloud environment .  

Among our various global clients,  A  client who offers a data platform for digital publishers approached us to migrate their infrastructure along with data from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Let us dive deep into the details about the customer challenges, migration process, proposed solutions, outcomes, and architectural diagram description.

Customer Background

Our client is a performance data platform  for digital publishers  that helps marquee publishers like  Futbol  Sites/ BolaVIP ,  Carousell , TSM Games/ BlitZ ,  LaOpinion ,  ElDiario , 1Weather, Times Internet –  Gaana ,  InMobi ,  FrontStory ,  SonyLIV , Zee5, Digit & eBay with use cases around analytics & optimization to help them manage & boost their ad-revenues.  They equip their customers with real-time data and insights to manage and accelerate revenue growth.

Customer Challenge

The client’s  requirements were to migrate their Infrastructure along with data from G oogle Cloud  P latform  to AWS .  All the applications and services which belong  to  GCP should be migrated  to AWS .  To meet the increasing customer demand, the client  wanted to migrate their application  running on GCP  to  the AWS  cloud and  manage the  infrastructure  efficiently .   The client required a robust and world-class infrastructure deployed on the AWS cloud platform to mitigate  the major  challenges.  Managing the current AWS resources and creating new resources with standard practices was a significant challenge for the client. The entire engineering process needed to be changed to improve reliability and customer experience.  The focus was on  cost optimization,  fault-tolerant, and HA (highly available) applications hosted on AWS cloud for a successful IT transformation for the client’s business environment.   

Assessment Process Employed

Our client was keen on building a robust cloud migration methodology to improve reliability and performance, operate more securely, optimize costs, and automate security and thus improve the overall security posture.  Their existing used Dataflow for Batch and Streaming jobs where Batch jobs were infrequent running day by day in Dataflow and Streaming job was running for previous 160 days. They inserted data streams during the transformation from Cloud Pub/Sub to Big Query streaming jobs. We assessed and suggested to them to use the service from the Kinesis data family for data streaming and batch jobs.   

They employed BigQuery for querying on 50 TB of their data and for performing streaming inserts coming from Dataflow. And then that data was queried on the basis of business logic required from Big Query and sent to the application.   

Though for BigQuery we have two options Athena or Redshift in AWS as per the processing requirements. Eventually, we zeroed down on Athena as it will be cheaper than Redshift providing cost optimization benefits.

Business Objectives Identified

• By migrating from GCP to AWS cloud, the customer will be able to avail the value benefits of AWS services and have a secure and reliable cloud computing platform  
• Use of AWS Cloud services for their Analytics and Application requirements  
• Reduce data storage cost  
• Optimize the performance of data analytics.

Our Proposed Solution

• Setup of highly available and scalable application for serving the massive traffic with the help of EC2, ALB, CloudFront  
• Setup of WordPress application on AWS LightSail  
• Setup of RDS DB  
• Configure SNS and SQS for all the topics and subscriptions that belong to Google Pub-Sub.  
• Migrated GCS data to AWS S3.  
• Configure Glue Crawlers on S3 to create the databases and tables for Athena.

Role of AWS in the Proposed Solution

We extensively used employed AWS features and services in deploying the solution. Important ones include:  Amazon Athena,  AWS Glue ,  Amazon S3,  Amazon SNS,  Amazon SQS ,  Amazon EC2 ,  AWS Elastic Load Balancing ,  Amazon CloudFront ,  AWS CloudWatch,  Amazon RDS, and,  Amazon QuickSight

The Project Outcomes

• Cost optimization is achieved by minimizing the service bill that was expensive prior to migration    
• The Core Application is Highly Scalable and Available running on an EC2 server with Load balancing and CDN in place  
• We have migrated GCS buckets to Amazon S3 and used AWS Glue and Athena to work seamlessly  
• The client has started using AWS services for their analytics, such as Amazon Athena, AWS Glue   
• The database tables get updated on an hourly basis  
• The Client application querying on S3 using Amazon Athena, thus helping for cost and performance optimization  
• All the data is archived and stored as backup. 

Architecture Diagram and Design Used

• AWS Architecture Diagram and Design

AWS EC2 instances were used to run and serve the application using the public-facing Application Load balancers and CloudFront as a caching layer. Amazon S3 was used for storing static data and serving that data to Glue Crawlers which is then queried by AWS Athena service. Amazon SNS is used as a publisher to send messages according to the required topics and Amazon SQS is used as a subscriber to send and process data as per the requirements by different application services. We employed Amazon QuickSight to provide BI dashboards and analytics.

2. AWS Architecture Diagram

AWS Lambda is employed to run cron tasks on the tables (AWS Athena) which stores the resultant data on S3. Those S3 insights were processed and served using an Application Load balancer with CloudFront caching.

3. Automation of serving Athena tables with data of previous 30 days from S3

• Deleting partition from the tables which are older than 30 days
• Moving the data files that are deleted from the table to different S3 bucket

4. Highly available and Scalable Architecture and Automation of Athena table Updating Process:

• The web layer is exposed to the internet via the CloudFront caching layer and public-facing internal LoadBalancer. Internal applications run on the EC2 server fleets which are highly scalable and highly available.
• AWS EC2: Serving and writing logs data to S3 every hour.
• Lambda function 1 : XYZ-Production-Job.
• Triggered on S3 push event.
• Start Glue Crawlers according to the name of the table.

Automation Architecture Diagram

5. Automation of Table Deletion from the Temp Database

• CloudWatch Event Rule: trigger the Lambda function daily at 11:30
• Lambda function 1: Delete-Temp-Tables
• Delete and recreate the temp database

Serverless Automation for deleting temporary database

Cloud migration involves capital risks, budget issues, disaster recovery strategy, and many other aspects. During the process, the security posture can be vulnerable and unstable which could lead to potential adversaries. It is recommended to choose an expert third-party vendor to manage your data migration requirements.

CloudThat  is Microsoft Gold Partner, AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, and a Google Cloud Partner and has successfully led many migration projects for our esteemed clients. Get in touch with us for quick results. Feel free to drop a comment or any queries that you have regarding cloud migration, and we will get back to you quickly. To get started, go through our  Expert Advisory  page  and  Managed Services Package  that is  CloudThat ’s  offerings. You can easily get in touch with our highly accomplished team of experts to carry out your migration needs.

Learn more about Cloud Migration Methodology and implementation here: 5 Key Cloud Migration Challenges and Their Proven Solutions

Feel free to drop a comment or any queries that you have regarding cloud migration, and we will get back to you quickly.

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Cloud migration is the process of moving data, applications and workloads from an on-premises data center to a cloud-based infrastructure, or from one cloud environment to another, known as cloud-to-cloud migration.

A company might migrate to either a single cloud or multiple. They can use public cloud models, where services are delivered over the public internet, or private cloud models, with a secure, proprietary cloud infrastructure accessible only to them. Many organizations choose a  hybrid cloud environment, which combines public and private cloud services to create a single, flexible, cost-effective IT infrastructure that supports and automates workload management across cloud environments.

Multiclouds offer another option, which allows companies to migrate IT infrastructure by using multiple public cloud providers. Multiclouds can be as simple as using software as a service (SaaS) from different vendors to employ portability features across infrastructures. However, they often involve managing enterprise applications on platform as a service (PaaS) or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) across multiple cloud vendors—such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud® and Microsoft Azure—from a central console.

Strategic application modernization is one key to transformational success that can boost annual revenue and lower maintenance and running costs.

Achieve workplace flexibility with DaaS

There are different types of cloud migration, varying in terms of what is being migrated and where it is moving to:

This cloud migration is the process of moving all data, applications and services from on-premises data centers to a cloud provider’s servers. This process is generally extensive and requires thorough planning and testing to ensure efficient execution.

Hybrid cloud migration involves moving a portion of resources to public cloud while leaving others in on-premises data centers. This hybrid cloud scenario allows organizations to take advantage of current investments in on-premises infrastructure while also using the flexibility, efficiency, strategic value and other benefits of public cloud.

Enterprises also use hybrid cloud migration for data backup. In this case, a company backs up its private cloud resources on a public cloud as a mitigation technique when an attack or disaster renders an on-premises data center inoperable.

Organizations might move their resources from one public cloud to another for many reasons. These reasons include taking advantage of specific pricing models, security features or products (such as new AI or machine learning tools) or because of changes to company structure or service level agreements.  

Another option is to migrate specific workloads to the cloud. For example, an organization might choose to migrate certain databases or mainframes to the cloud as a way to capitalize on lower costs, or for more reliable performance, better security and other factors.

Cloud migration has become a modernization imperative for businesses looking to streamline IT operations, implement cost-saving measures and realize end-to-end digital transformation . Tech analysts predict that 75% of organizations will adopt cloud-based data infrastructure by 2026. 1

To ensure a successful transition, organizations should follow a well-defined workflow that focuses on comprehensive planning, execution and optimization.

The first step in the workflow is cloud migration planning , which includes clearly articulating the business case for the migration. After the team has established the reasons for the migration, it’s important thoroughly assess existing IT infrastructure , apps and data to identify what’s suitable for migration and to assess dependencies that require attention. In this phase, teams typically:

• List and categorize apps and data
• Analyze app dependencies and interdependencies
• Evaluate security and compliance requirements
• Assess performance and scalability needs
• Establish migration goals and priorities
• Identify potential migration challenges

When the assessment is complete, it’s time to select the cloud provider that best aligns with business needs. Some factors to consider:

• Provider compatibility with existing apps and data
• Service offerings, pricing models and support capabilities
• Data sovereignty and compliance considerations
• Scalability and availability of required resources
• Interoperability with existing systems

This process involves determining how apps, data and infrastructure are organized in the cloud environment. Key considerations include:

• Designing scalable and resilient cloud architectures
• Defining networking and security configurations
• Identifying appropriate cloud services and features
• Optimizing cost-efficiency and performance
• Ensuring data backup and disaster recovery mechanisms

In this stage, the team transfers the existing IT infrastructure to the new cloud environment. Depending on the migration strategy (such as lift-and-shift, replatforming or refactoring), the execution process involves:

• Setting up the target cloud environment
• Provisioning virtual machines, storage and network resources
• Replicating or migrating data to the cloud
• Deploying and configuring apps in the new cloud infrastructure

Rigorous testing is vital to ensuring the functionality of newly transferred apps and data. Many teams choose to conduct:

• Functional testing to validate application migration
• Performance and load testing to assess scalability and responsiveness
• Security testing to identify vulnerabilities and ensure compliance
• User acceptance testing to validate end-user experience

It’s also important to resolve any issues or bugs identified during the testing and validation process.

At this point, the focus shifts to optimizing the cloud resources and configurations. This step entails:

• Fine-tuning applications
• Installing the necessary security measures and access controls
• Setting up monitoring and alerting mechanisms
• Streamlining resource usage
• Establishing governance and management processes

But cloud adoption isn’t a single-step process. Massive infrastructure and data transfers require continuous, real-time performance monitoring to really optimize the features of the new cloud infrastructure and ensure the long-term success of the migration. Organizations should be prepared to update or upgrade software and security protocols, scale up or down based on demand patterns, and monitor cloud costs to optimize cost-effectiveness.

Successful cloud migration requires a comprehensive strategy that lays out migration goals and anticipates challenges. For instance, legacy applications in an organization’s network might not be optimized for the cloud, so they must be prepared for the process with migration tools and approaches designed for the task.

Migration strategy should account for workloads that move to the cloud, the workloads that stay within the on-premises infrastructure, and any new capabilities or applications the team should add after the migration is complete. The migration plan should also include roadmaps, timelines, project metrics and goals, and a strategy for relaying information to team leaders, cloud vendors and other stakeholders.

While each company’s exact approach will vary based on their circumstances and cloud service needs, there are some tried-and-true cloud migration strategies that can streamline the process.

Typically the quickest and least complex migration approach, rehosting (also called lift-and-shift) involves migrating applications and data from onsite infrastructure to a cloud platform without making significant changes to the architecture, likely by using IaaS tools. However, this transfer strategy doesn’t fully take advantage of cloud-native features, so it’s best for applications that aren’t tightly coupled to the underlying infrastructure.

A replatforming (also known as lift-and-reshape) cloud strategy attempts to use some cloud-native features while maintaining compatibility by making specific, but minimal, changes to the existing IT architecture. A few examples of cloud-native features include  microservice architecture, Kubernetes containers and  machine learning models. 

A refactoring, or rearchitecting, approach requires the organization to redesign and redevelop applications by using a PaaS tool to fully use cloud-native capabilities. Since it often requires significant changes to existing architecture, it tends to make data migration more scalable, resilient and efficient in the cloud environment. Refactoring allows businesses to maximize the business value of cloud systems and use modern architectural patterns and models, such as microservices and serverless computing.

The repurchasing strategy involves retiring an existing application and replacing it with a SaaS alternative. Instead of migrating the application to the cloud, businesses opt for a cloud-based SaaS system that meets their needs. This approach provides instant access to cloud-based applications without the need for significant development efforts. Repurchasing can be useful for transferring non-core applications like email, customer relationship management  and human resources management.

Finally, to implement a retiring approach, businesses must decommission outdated and unused applications. As part of the migration process, teams identify extraneous applications or systems and shut them down, reducing maintenance costs, eliminating redundant resources and streamlining the migration process by focusing only on critical applications.

Be sure to cover specific use cases (for example, mission-critical enterprise applications,  data backup and recovery , productivity or collaboration applications, software development projects) for the workloads you’re migrating. Defining use cases up front enables better strategy decisions and smoother execution.

Companies worldwide are embracing cloud migration for the various benefits that cloud computing offers. Here are just a few ways that an organization can benefit from cloud migration:

Because cloud-based infrastructure removes many of the physical and financial obstacles to scalability (for example, data center infrastructure, or onsite server maintenance), it enables businesses to easily upscale or downscale their IT requirements when necessary.

Cloud services let businesses subscribe to workload management services on a pay-as-you-go basis. Instead of adding onsite capacity to anticipate future needs, companies can pay for the capacity they need now and scale on demand. Cloud services also help lower costs associated with setting up and running onsite data centers, which often require hefty hardware and utility expenditures and a large network of servers.

Although no system is foolproof, cloud service providers implement extensive measures to protect sensitive data, and comply with industry standards and government regulations. Security tools and protocols can protect cloud environments and cloud environments can automate software and security updates, measures that reduce security risk. 2

Furthermore, cloud migration helps ensure data safety. In the event of a disaster, cloud infrastructure facilitates data recovery and helps maintain business continuity with minimal downtime, latency issues or data loss.

Migrating applications to the cloud empowers businesses to adopt new technologies faster and enables affordable, just-in-time technology adoption in response to new business opportunities.

For instance, if a retail company wants to introduce an AI-driven recommendation system to its online store without cloud infrastructure, the company must make considerable hardware investments. These investments include the cost of purchasing, installing and maintaining on-premises infrastructure, and hiring personnel to manage it. It would also take quite a while to get the new infrastructure up and running. With a cloud-based infrastructure, the company might install the new AI system, at scale, within minutes, significantly reducing the time between decision-making and implementation.

The Instana Observability platform provides real-time performance data that helps businesses optimize their hybrid cloud networks and make the most of cloud migration investments. 

The IBM Turbonomic platform provides cloud migration planning that allows you to optimize your cloud consumption from the start and simplify your cloud migration process.

IBM Consulting® cloud migration services help manage cloud migration for your business, allowing you to focus on everything else.

Before embarking on the cloud migration process, use these six steps to gain a clear understanding of what’s involved to successfully migrate applications to the cloud.

Based on research from Forrester, this report will help your business start the modernization journey with migration to the cloud.

See how a combination of observable IT components, machine learning and AI makes it possible to recognize brewing software problems before they become incidents.

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are the three most popular types of cloud service offerings. They are sometimes referred to as cloud service models or cloud computing service models.

Application migration is the process of moving a software application from one computing environment to another.

Lift and shift is the process of migrating an exact copy of an application or workload, together with its data store and OS, from one environment to another.

IBM Turbonomic allows you to run applications seamlessly, continuously and cost-effectively to help achieve efficient app performance while lowering costs.

1 “ Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Reach Nearly USD 600 Billion in 2023 ” (link resides outside ibm.com), Gartner, 19 April 2023

2 “ Understanding Patches and Software Updates ” (link resides outside ibm.com), CISA, 23 February 2023

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Migrate ensures data governance in the cloud and expands its product’s capabilities

About Migrate

Migrate is a Brazilian company that issues and manages electronic tax documents for customers in Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Established in 2004, it now has 70 employees and 30,000+ end customers.

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About Avenue Code

Avenue Code is a software consultancy firm and a Google Cloud partner. It focuses on delivering development solutions, aiming toward digital transformation in every vertical through technical intelligence, collaborative troubleshooting capabilities, and professionalism.

With support from Avenue Code, the company migrated its structure to Google Cloud and improved asset management, increased customer retention, and enhanced its performance.

• 15%–20% in cost savings
• Improved data governance
• Ensured environment stability and accessibility
• Increased customer satisfaction

New server creation time cut from 24 hours to two minutes

Migrate is a Brazilian IT company that issues and manages electronic tax documents for customers in Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Established in 2004, it now has 70 employees and 30,000+ end customers. It also handles the issuance and automated capture of electronic service invoices (NFS-e) in more than 2,600 cities, in addition to other documents such as electronic invoices (NF-e), electronic bills of lading (CT-e), and tax-document electronic manifestos (MDF-e).

Through its services, the company delivers technology, performance, and security to its customers. Its biggest differentiator is its platform, InvoiCy, which enables integration with systems via APIs or desktop plugins, and allows for centralized document management.

Despite all the infrastructure in place to meet user demands, Migrate understands that tax invoicing is a highly critical process. As an operation that must work 24/7, the platform can never stop, meaning the environment’s stability is essential to ensure deliveries.

The main challenge facing the company was its SQL server, which it used to issue invoices and store XML files. This server was slow, unstable, and generated costs requiring increasingly large investments. Consequently, Migrate started assessing a few cloud solutions to see if they met its technical expectations.

“Google Cloud’s app suite, integrations, and management panel were all aspects we held in high regard, especially the cloud-native concept. Services providing stability and scalability, as well as many other possibilities, were factors that influenced our choice.”

Strategies for the migration journey

Avenue Code was the Google Cloud partner that supported the company throughout the migration process. The company’s entire infrastructure and SQL production servers were migrated to the public cloud. The project had to be completed quickly and, as far as Migrate was concerned, Avenue Code’s support was crucial, as it has experts whose wealth of knowledge allows them to intervene in every step of the process.

Therefore, the time spent honing the database architecture, optimizing performance, and importing 20 TB of data to Google Cloud was just three months, from July to September 2019. Including a planning period before execution, everything was completed in about four months.

Avenue Code created two apps in Dataflow for the project. The first was for migrating data from the old data center to an optimized structure in the cloud, and the second was for ensuring data integrity by verifying consistency in the source and target databases.

“We operate in a development environment. We create pipelines in Dataflow and run tests. Only then do we start the lift-and-shift to avoid impacting the customer’s business during migration. We’ve maintained the synchronization between the on-prem database and Google Cloud without any downtime.”

Currently, most of Migrate’s application is deployed in Compute Engine instances. Cloud Load Balancing is used to scale instances based on demand. Structured files, such as XML and JSON, are stored in Cloud Storage . App Engine resources are used to authenticate APIs and automate tasks.

Perceived results

Since the project was implemented, Migrate has noticed various benefits. The time needed to create a new server dropped from 24 hours to two minutes. Total environment costs were cut by 15%–20%. Moreover, data governance has improved, the environment is more stable and accessible, and the company can rely on automated service monitoring.

“The company has improved resource management, reaped the benefits from a modern, up-to-date environment, and gained access to horizontal scalability, support for high data volumes and new technologies,” says Caram.

The environment has also allowed for business development thanks to the wide breadth of Google Cloud tools, which enabled the creation of an extension layer with new features in InvoiCy, an expansion that allowed Migrate to serve customers in situations other than document issuance.

“We have a more robust solution and a reliable structure that suits the development of our product. We have also reached a service satisfaction level of 86, meaning excellent retention rates, according to the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology. This is an optimal score tying in with our customers’ satisfaction.”

The company is now 100% in the cloud and issues 2 million documents every day. Currently, the computing environment management is a strong differentiator, aiming to streamline information management and monitor actions through automated parameters and alerts.

This is a significant gain for the company, which intends to reach its next goal soon: deploying artificial intelligence and data mining services. Once again, Migrate will count on its professional expertise and the facilities enabled by Avenue Code and Google Cloud for that purpose.

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Cloud Volumes ONTAP: Cloud Migration Case Studies

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April 25, 2019

Topics: cloud volumes ontap data migration customer case study advanced 7 minute read.

With the vast majority of enterprises already using the public cloud, the new focus of cloud migration strategy has shifted from low-cost and flexible IT infrastructure to leveraging mission-critical apps and workloads in the cloud.

This blog post looks at cloud migration challenges and opportunities and describes three cloud migration case studies using Cloud Volumes ONTAP.

Why Migrate from On-Premises to the Cloud?

What is cloud migration.

The cloud migration process involves moving all or part of an organization’s data, apps, and services from on-premises data centers to a public or private cloud, where they are accessible on-demand over the Internet to authorized users. While some workloads can be transitioned to the cloud as is— also known as a “ lift and shift ” —others may require refactoring.

As an indication of how cloud migration strategy is evolving, research from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) shows that almost 70% of organizations are migrating data for their ERP apps from on-premises to the cloud—with 90% of those stating that they consider these apps to be business-critical. And just in case you thought that the cloud migration trend might be reaching a plateau, market analysts are forecasting that, on average, global revenues from cloud migration services will grow by ~22% each year over the next five years.

A key driver for data migration to the cloud is that cloud environments are becoming more diverse, offering enterprises numerous deployment options such as private, public, and hybrid cloud architectures. We have also seen the emergence of robust automation and orchestration platforms that ease the pain of managing even complex cloud infrastructures. Other drivers for cloud migration include:

• Very efficient and cost-effective backup and disaster recovery capabilities.
• High availability for geographically-distributed enterprises as well as for the growing trends of teleworking and mobile device use.
• Reducing operational costs and freeing up IT human resources to fuel business growth initiatives.
• A safer space. The cloud has come to be considered a highly-secure infrastructure.

Cloud Migration Challenges

Cloud adoption and migration, however, are not without challenges. It is important to have a plan in place before the migration takes place in order to avoid issues with:

• Accessibility: It’s not enough to migrate a file share to the cloud. You also have to be able to access files via the same NAS protocols: NFS and SMB /CIFS.
• Interoperability: When migrating a database or other workflow to the cloud, you must take into account its interdependencies with external resources, as well as its network or VLAN topologies.
• Performance and availability: An app’s resource requirements must still be met after migrating its data to the cloud.
• Data protection in the cloud requires a paradigm shift in data governance and access controls.
• Costs: Large-scale data migration can incur hefty bandwidth costs. It also often requires production downtime, which has significant direct and indirect costs.
• An optimal hybrid architecture (what to leave on-premise and what to move to the cloud): The organization must also have the skills and technology to manage a hybrid infrastructure.
• Security vulnerabilities: Organizations sometimes overlook the vulnerability of their data during the transfer from on-premise to the cloud.

Cloud Migration Case Studies

Cloud Volumes ONTAP is an enterprise-grade data management platform that runs as a virtual storage appliance on the AWS and Azure clouds. Leveraging NetApp’s industry-leading data storage and management technologies, Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides a software-defined storage (SDS) solution with single-pane visibility for orchestration across even the most complex hybrid and multicloud infrastructures. Its data replication, backup, and disaster recovery capabilities ensure that the organization’s cloud-based assets are cost-effectively managed and protected against loss or corruption.

What follows are three cloud migration case studies of enterprises that leveraged Cloud Volumes ONTAP for smooth transitions of their data to the cloud.

The Cordant Group

The Cordant Group is a UK company that started in security services and later expanded into facilities management as well as recruitment. With 190+ locations and 5,000+ clients throughout the UK—and growing—the company has an extensive IT infrastructure.

As part of a strategic decision to shift from a CAPEX to an OPEX model, the company had already migrated its infrastructure to a private isolated section on AWS. However, the company found itself restricted to the use of Windows DFS to manage its server resources. Another challenge was related to SQL databases that held business-critical information. As a veteran NetApp customer, they were able to use SnapMirror ® technology to easily replicate data from its physical storage infrastructure to the AWS public cloud and reap the following benefits:

• NetApp Snapshots™ for quick and cost-effective backups in the cloud that complies with a rigorous data restore objective of less than an hour.
• Leverage SnapManager® for SQL for crash-consistent, application-aware backup copies with little or no impact on their storage resources or application performance.
• A robust and cost-effective cloud disaster recovery solution with automatic failover and failback capabilities when things go wrong.
• The ability to provision both NAS and SAN storage, with support and multi-protocol access for SMB/ CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI.
• Single-pane centralized management of their hybrid architecture via NetApp BlueXP Console . 

In short, by migrating and then managing their data with Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the Cordant Group achieved the scalability they needed to grow their business, realized storage efficiencies and cost savings of 40-50%, gained the flexibility of a hybrid architecture, and could rest assured that their data was protected wherever it resided.

Read the full case study here .

AdvancedMD provides a SaaS medical office workflow solution that automates manual front office and billing processes, maintains always-accessible electronic medical and health records, and promotes patient engagement. With AdvancedMD deployed, physicians can focus on improving patient care, with the added bonus of increased revenue because their practice is running more efficiently.

When AdvancedMD was spun off from its parent company, ADP, they had to quickly move all their data out of the ADP data center. As ADP was an existing user of NetApp storage technology in-house, AdvancedMD decided to use Cloud Volumes ONTAP for AWS for moving to the cloud. The key benefits that they gained were:

• Easy lift and shift of their SQL database and their file shares, with no need to change their infrastructure architecture.
• High availability dual-node redundancy for AWS and for Azure to provide minimal downtime in failures or upgrades, a critical requirement when dealing with important healthcare data.
• Storage efficiencies , such as data deduplication, compression, and compaction as well as thin provisioning, automated tiering , and instantaneous data cloning to writable volumes with zero impact on storage footprints.
• The intuitive BlueXP Console interface, with simple lift-and-shift drag-and-drop operations, as well as support for data management automation and orchestration.
• During the migration and afterwards: Enterprise-level data protection and encryption (especially important for sensitive healthcare data, HIPAA regulations) without sacrificing scalability or agility.

Read the customer blog here .

Large Financial Institution

With origins as a government-sponsored institution, today this company is a fully privatized bank that owns nearly one-fifth of the student debt across the United States. Offering more than 500 savings plans and operating across several states, this massive financial institution has annual revenues of ~$1.6 billion and employs 1,500 people nationwide.

The company had made a strategic decision to transition workloads from their on-prem data center to the public cloud. However, they also needed to maintain a consistent Data Fabric across which data could flow seamlessly between their on-prem and public cloud storage resources.

The first task was to replicate more than 50 TB (!) of production WORM (Write Once, Read Many) data to Amazon S3 object storage from their NetApp on-prem storage arrays. They were delighted to see that they could accomplish this quickly and securely using the Cloud Sync automated data synchronization service.

Data migration to the cloud is growing as enterprises embrace the benefits of moving business-critical workloads to the cloud. However, cloud transitions must be carried out with care in order to maintain seamless access to file shares and databases, protect and secure data, and uphold application and database performance SLAs.

NetApp’s Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps enterprises achieve their cloud migration objectives with intuitive lift-and-shift workflows, robust backup and DR solutions, cost-reducing storage efficiencies, and high availability.

For enterprises that use NetApp’s on-prem storage arrays, Cloud Volumes ONTAP also offers automated data synchronization across a single Data Fabric. Download this free guide to cloud migration to find out more.

Technical Content Manager

Cloud-migration opportunity: Business value grows, but missteps abound

By 2024, most enterprises aspire to have $8 out of every $10 for IT hosting go toward the cloud, including private cloud, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Achieving that aspiration will require significant effort from both enterprises and technology providers.

The COVID-19 pandemic is one factor driving the ambitious goal, as it triggered the need to speed the pace of enterprise digitization. But the more significant catalyst is the $1 trillion in business value  that cloud adoption can unlock. Some organizations, however, are leaking their share of that value instead of capturing it, with inefficiencies in orchestrating cloud migrations adding unexpected cost and delays. Approximately $100 billion of wasted migration spend is expected over the next three years, and most enterprises cite the costs around migration as a major inhibitor to adopting the cloud.

But not everyone is suffering these growing pains. A McKinsey survey of nearly 450 chief information officers (CIOs) and IT decision makers globally finds that a subset of organizations has shifted a majority of IT hosting to the cloud on time and on budget. This article reveals the aspirations and hurdles that business leaders are facing in their journey to the cloud—and what outperforming organizations are doing right.

Businesses that follow the lead of cloud-migration outperformers stand to unlock some $1 trillion in value.

Businesses were embracing the cloud even before the COVID-19 crisis, but the pandemic lent new urgency to its use. At one fast-casual-restaurant chain, for example, the number of online orders jumped to 400,000 per day, from 50,000. That volume would have overwhelmed the company’s legacy infrastructure, but the business had transitioned its e-commerce and online-ordering system to the cloud before pandemic-related lockdowns occurred. Having seen the benefits, leaders in the company now plan to compress their five-year migration plan to less than one year.

That company is not alone. Two years ago, legacy infrastructure accounted for the lion’s share of the average IT-hosting budget. At that time, enterprises set an aspiration to move around 45 percent of their IT-hosting spend to the cloud by 2021. But nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of surveyed decision makers say their organizations increased their cloud budgets as a result of the pandemic, and 55 percent moved more workloads than initially planned. With the cloud having proven its value, 40 percent of companies expect to pick up the pace of their implementations going forward.

Looking forward, leaders remain bullish. Our data show that by 2024, the average company aspires to have cloud spend represent 80 percent of its total IT-hosting budget.

Capturing value in the cloud

Hosting industry-specific applications on the cloud has growing appeal for businesses across sectors. Between 2021 and 2024, public-cloud spend on vertical applications (such as warehouse management in retail and enterprise risk management in banking) is set to grow by more than 40 percent annually, compared with around 25 percent for horizontal workloads (such as customer relationship management). And in healthcare and manufacturing, organizations plan to spend around twice as much on vertical applications than on horizontal ones.

The benefits for cloud-base vertical applications can be transformative. An apparel retailer moved its e-commerce application to SaaS so that it could expand into multiple international markets at once, a shift its homegrown system could not accommodate without a major rebuild. Avoiding custom development saved cost, time, and complexity and, because key competitors lacked a similarly robust e-commerce presence, the retailer could grow share faster, increasing its international revenues by more than 30 percent year on year.

Although companies are transitioning more workloads to the public cloud, missteps in coordinating the migration are taking a toll. Data show that those inefficiencies are costing the average company 14 percent more in migration spend than planned each year, and 38 percent of companies have seen their migrations delayed by more than one quarter.

When the 14 percent in unanticipated cloud-migration spend is tallied globally, the price tag is eye opening. Cost overruns at a global level add up to well more than $100 billion in wasted spend over the course of migration in three years. Left unchecked, those costs of moving workloads to the cloud could wipe out more than $500 billion in shareholder value over the same period.

A global pharmaceutical company sought to move nearly all its workloads to the cloud. At the end of 12 months, however, it had shifted only 40 percent of its first-year target. Overwhelmed, the company cut the scope of its cloud-adoption plans by roughly 50 percent and chose to retire more applications rather than move them. With the program now more than three quarters behind plan and costing 50 percent more than budgeted, the company hopes that with the right incentives in place, its systems-integrator (SI) partners will be motivated by the increased spend to accelerate the migration.

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Today the average company staffs around 35 percent of its cloud needs in house. To meet companies’ cloud ambitions, however, most hope to bring that number up to roughly 50 percent by 2024. That means organizations around the world will be looking to hire or reskill at least one million new cloud developers over the next three years. That demand is likely to exacerbate already tight talent supplies.

External labor is a way to fill the void, but some companies engage SIs without thinking through the best way to structure that partnership. Lacking in-house enterprise-architecture expertise, for example, a global pharmaceutical company turned its cloud migration almost entirely over to SIs. But because the SIs’ fees were based on time spent rather than on performance outcomes, they had little incentive to speed the migration, with the result that some projects took far longer than planned and cost more than budgeted. Across our study, spending on SIs was the most cited cost overrun outside of change management.

While most companies struggle with implementation delays, our study found that a subset—15 percent of the total sample—succeeded in migrating more than 60 percent of their IT-hosting spend to the cloud and did so within the timeline they set.

Analysis shows that those outperforming companies are 32 percent more likely than others to have active CEO sponsors. They are 9 percent more likely to develop the full implementation road map, including the security and compliance framework, up front rather than funding a series of one-off initiatives. And they are 57 percent more likely to hire for advanced skill sets (such as DevOps and FinOps). As important, they are also more decisive in pulling the plug on data-center funding to galvanize the cloud migration, even if it means paying early termination fees.

For example, at one consumer-packaged-goods company, the CEO pressed the case for cloud adoption, setting the top-down strategy and communicating with the entire company in written updates and town halls. Employees knew that the cloud strategy had the CEO’s direct support. As the company’s head of IT told us, “It’s not enough to have the CIO on board; you need CEO and board-level support to provide ‘air cover.’ It’s important to know that they have your back when you engage with others in the business.”

A path forward

Businesses can set their cloud migrations on a stronger foundation by following the example of outperformers. But providers and partners must do their part as well. Cloud-service providers should make value creation, not consumption, a core metric, and SIs and channel partners need to adapt their recipes for success, since the results of our study show that the approaches used for on-site implementations are not scaling effectively to the cloud.

Cloud-service providers that focus on value creation as a core metric can help businesses set a strong foundation in their cloud-migration efforts.

Tara Balakrishnan is an alumna of McKinsey’s Seattle office; Chandra Gnanasambandam is a senior partner in the Silicon Valley office, where Bhargs Srivathsan is an associate partner; and Leandro Santos is a senior partner in the Atlanta office.

The authors wish to thank Chhavi Arora, Jerome Bouaziz, Raghuvar Choppakatla, Adrian Chu, Tarek Elmasry, William Forrest, Neha Jindal, James Kaplan, Roger Roberts, Divya Sachdev, and Kaavini Takkar for their contributions to this article.

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How Amazon is Achieving Database Freedom Using AWS

Thomas Park, Senior Manager of Solution Architecture for Consumer Business Data Technologies, Amazon

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Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon.

• Cut database operating costs by 50%
• Eliminated most database-administration and hardware-management overhead
• Lowered latency of most critical services by 40%
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon Simple Storage Service
• Amazon Relational Database Service
• AWS Database Migration Service
• AWS Schema Conversion Tool

Untangling from Oracle: Easier Said Than Done

In Amazon's case, obstacles to leaving Oracle included the size of the company's fleet—more than 5,000 databases connected to a variety of non-standardized systems, with ownerships and dependencies that were not centrally inventoried. There were personnel-related risks as well. The careers of many Amazon employees were based on Oracle database platforms. Would they fully support the move? Would some just leave?

Similar challenges face the many other companies that want to switch from Oracle to AWS. Just like those other companies, Amazon had urgent reasons to make it work. Amazon engineers were wasting too much time on complicated and error-prone database administration, provisioning, and capacity planning. The company's steep growth trajectory—and sharply rising throughput—required more and more Oracle database shards, with all the added operations and maintenance overhead those bring. And then there were the costs: business as usual on Oracle would increase the millions of dollars Amazon was already paying for its license: a jaw-dropping 10 percent a year.

"It was the same situation for us as it is for so many enterprises," says Thomas Park, senior manager of solutions architecture for Consumer Business Data Technologies at Amazon.com, who helped lead the migration project. "Oracle was both our biggest reason for, and most significant obstacle against, shifting onto AWS."

That was then. Today, Amazon stands on the verge of completing the migration of about 50 petabytes of data and shutting down the last of those 5,000 Oracle databases. How did the company pull off this massive migration?

Managing Culture Change and Technical Complexity

Amazon faced two key challenges during the migration. One was how to tackle the large-scale program management necessary to motivate its diverse, globally distributed teams to embrace the project and track its progress. The other was the technical complexity of the migration. For the project to be successful, it was clear that the company's business lines would need centralized coordination, education, and technical support.

To overcome these challenges, Amazon began by creating an enterprise Program Management Office (PMO), which set clear performance requirements and established weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews with each service team to track and report progress and program status.

"In establishing the program we had to clearly define what we were trying to achieve and why, before we addressed the ‘how,’” says Dave George, Amazon’s director of Consumer Business Data Technologies. “Once we established the ‘what’ and the ‘why,’ we established clear goals with active executive sponsorship. This sponsorship ensured that our many distributed tech teams had a clear, unambiguous focus and were committed to deliver these goals. Relentless focus on delivery ensured that disruption to other business priorities was minimized while achieving a significant architectural refresh of core systems.”

Also key to the project's success was an AWS technical core team of experienced solutions architects and database engineers. This team made recommendations as to which AWS services would be best suited for each category of Amazon data being migrated from Oracle, including:

• Amazon DynamoDB : recommended for critical services requiring high availability, mutating schemas, and consistent, single-digit millisecond latency at scale.
• Amazon Aurora : recommended for services with stable schemas requiring high availability and strong referential integrity.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3): recommended for inexpensive, long term storage of relational and non-relational data.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL or MySQL: recommended for non-critical services and ease of set up, operation, and scaling.
• AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS): helps migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains fully operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. DMS can migrate data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases.
• AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT): makes heterogeneous database migrations predictable by automatically converting the source database schema and a majority of the database code objects, including views, stored procedures, and functions, to a format compatible with the target database.

This team also provided formal instruction about specific AWS services, ran hands-on labs, offered one-on-one consultations and coordinated direct assistance by AWS product teams for Amazon businesses experiencing specific challenges.

"Having this central team staffed with experienced solutions architects and database engineers was crucial to the project's success," says Park. “The team not only helped educate Amazon business teams but provided feedback and feature requests that made AWS services even stronger for all customers."

Amazon also thought carefully about how best to help its Oracle database administrators transition onto the new career paths now open to them. One option was to help them gain the skills necessary to become AWS solutions architects. Another was a managerial role in which an Oracle background would be helpful during the ongoing process of bridging traditional Oracle-based environments and AWS Cloud environments.

Database Freedom on AWS

Migrating to AWS has cut Amazon's annual database operating costs by more than half, despite having provisioned higher capacity after the move. Database-administration and hardware-management overhead have been greatly reduced, and cost allocation across teams is much simpler than before. Most of the services that were replatformed to Amazon DynamoDB—typically the most critical services, requiring high availability and single-digit millisecond latency at scale—saw a 40-percent reduction in latency, despite now handling twice the volume of transactions. During the migration, service teams also took the opportunity to further stabilize services, eliminate technical debt, and fully document all code and dependencies.

Reflecting on the scope of the project—a migration that affected 800 services, thousands of microservices, tens of thousands of employees, and millions of customers, and that resulted in an AWS database footprint for Amazon larger than for 90 percent of its fellow AWS customers—Amazon.com sees a lesson for other large enterprises contemplating a similar move.

"No one involved with this migration project would say it was simple, easy, or fun, but it didn't take superpowers, either. If a company like Amazon can move so many decentralized, globally distributed databases from Oracle to AWS, it's really within the reach of almost any enterprise."

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CASE STUDY: Cloud Migration

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Cloud Migration Case Study: How Capital One Successfully Transitioned to the Cloud

In the digital age, businesses need to adapt to remain competitive, and a significant part of that adaptation involves embracing new technologies. Capital One, a leading financial institution, stands as a noteworthy example of a company that has capitalized on the transformative power of cloud technology. With this migration, the bank successfully streamlined its operations, improved its services, and enhanced the customer experience.

A Cloud-First Approach

Capital One was among the first banks to embrace a "cloud-first" approach, in part to foster innovation and agility within the organization. The financial behemoth partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its cloud services, ensuring a robust, reliable, and secure platform for its operations.

The migration was systematic and well-orchestrated. High-priority applications were identified and transitioned to the cloud, focusing on customer-facing systems for optimal impact. The company's mobile banking app and customer account platforms were some of the first to make the leap, demonstrating the firm's commitment to customer-centric digitization.

Efficiency, Scalability, and Cost Savings

Cloud migration provided Capital One with significant advantages. Firstly, operational efficiency saw a substantial boost. The agility of cloud computing allowed for quicker deployment of updates and new features, directly benefiting customers. Scalability, another boon of cloud computing, meant the company could easily adjust its resource usage based on demand, ensuring optimal performance at all times.

The financial aspect was not neglected, either. Shifting to the cloud resulted in tangible cost savings. Capital One was able to reduce its data center footprint from eight in 2014 to zero in 2020, significantly cutting infrastructure and maintenance costs.

Driving Innovation

Perhaps the most transformative impact of Capital One's cloud migration lies in its ability to drive innovation. Cloud-based operations have unlocked new opportunities for the bank, particularly in areas such as machine learning and real-time data processing. By harnessing these technologies, the bank can provide more personalized customer experiences, more precise risk assessments, and improved fraud detection.

Adapting to Change

Despite its size and standing in the banking sector, Capital One's approach to cloud migration provides an important lesson for businesses of all sizes and industries. It underlines the importance of embracing change and leveraging new technologies to improve operations and services.

As technology advances, a company's ability to adapt and leverage these advances becomes increasingly crucial. At Thinklogic, we understand this reality. Our team helps businesses navigate the complexities of digital transformation, whether it's developing custom web-based software applications or facilitating a smooth transition to the cloud. We believe that the right technology solutions can enhance growth and efficiency and are committed to ensuring your business reaps these benefits.

Conclusion: Capital One's Triumph in Cloud Evolution

Capital One's cloud migration journey underscores the transformative potential of cloud technology. By adopting a cloud-first strategy, the bank has not only improved its operations but has also driven innovation and enhanced the customer experience.

Cloud migration may seem like a daunting task, but with the right strategy and the right partners, it can open up a world of opportunities.

Ready to embark on your own transformative digital journey? Reach out to our experts and let's innovate together. Connect with us now at https://www.thinklogic.com/connect.  

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Migrating to GCP with a practical case study

Introduction.

Migrating to a public cloud is never an easy task. It triggers very often questions like:

• Will the application have compatibility issues that could interfere with the migration process?
• Could the private data be accessed by the owners of the cloud or by anyone else outside of the company?
• Because it is a public cloud and it is exposed to the internet, is there any risk for the system to be hacked?

All these questions express reasonable fears that keep companies from migrating to the public cloud, but if we analyze them more deeply, we can realize that they are not real. 

For example, all main cloud providers encrypt by default all the data at rest and offer strong mechanisms of authentication and authorization to ensure that only the right people can access them. Moreover, you can use your own keys to encrypt the information to ensure that nobody outside your company can access it. In addition to this, these cloud providers are some of the biggest internet companies , this means they have much better security solutions than any other company in the world, and because of that, it is less feasible that they can be hacked.

So, in general, it is more secure and cost-effective to migrate to a public cloud than to build and maintain your own data center, and in the following sections, we are going to see how to do it using GCP.

GCP features

We have already seen some of the fears that companies have about migrating to a public cloud and why they are not real, and now, we are going to see all the benefits that this migration could have for the company. In particular, we are going to see some of the advantages that GCP (Google Cloud Platform) has, that makes this cloud more attractive than its main competitors (AWS, Azure).

First of all, Google is one of the most committed companies to open-source projects, and in fact, many of the top open-source projects nowadays were born inside Google, like Kubernetes, Tensorflow, Angular, etc… And because of that, most of the services offered by Google are compatible with open-source projects, and this allows you to avoid vendor lock-in easily. 

Another great feature is that in GCP all the network infrastructure including routers, firewalls, and load balancers, are not physical but virtual components, so there can’t be hardware failures. In addition to this, it is possible to create virtual networks and subnetworks that spawn across different geographical zones making the high availability solutions easier to implement.

Another important thing is that the solutions offered by GCP are in general more affordable than the ones offered by its competitors thanks to features like preemptible machines or sustained use discounts.

And last but not least, you are using the same infrastructure that some of the most scalable applications in the world use,  like Google Search, Gmail, or Google Maps, with all the benefits that this provides.

Example Case Study

Once we have seen the main features of Google Cloud and the benefits that it has over its competitors, we are going to use a case study of a hypothetical company that wants to migrate to Google cloud. We are going to see what is its current situation and what are the goals they want to achieve with the migration, and then we will review what are the choicOnce we have seen the main features of Google Cloud and the benefits that it has over its competitors, we are going to use a case study of a hypothetical company that wants to migrate to Google Cloud. We are going to see what its current situation is and what the goals they want to achieve with the migration are, and then we will review what choices are offered by Google for every aspect of the migration (networking, compute, storage, …) and what is the best option regarding the requirements:

Current situation

The company is a bicycle rental company that has grown rapidly in the last few years and its CEO is considering migrating to the public cloud to avoid buying new infrastructure and improve customer service.

There is currently an application that registers users and has a list of bicycle exchange locations, and it works as follows: 

When a user arrives at an exchange point, the user  selects in the application the bike they want to rent(by scanning the code of the bicycle), this allows them to unlock the bicycle for use, when they arrive at the destination, the point of arrival is registered. With this data, the application calculates the distance and time spent on the journey.

In the event that a certain amount of time passes without the user having left the bike at another point, they will be charged a fine for the value of the bike if it is not recovered.

This is a company that only offers service in western Europe and they do not plan to expand due to the logistics costs (bikes, exchange points, etc.).

The technology stack used consists of a single monolithic application deployed on its own server with a web front-end and REST APIs that are consumed by the mobile application. The data is persisted in a PostgreSQLv12 database.

One of the first things they want to do is to break their existing application into smaller ones that can be developed and scaled independently.

In addition to this, the company wants to equip the bikes with GPS that periodically send their position to better calculate the distance traveled as well as to be able to recover it in case of loss or theft. Right now it can’t be done because the application can’t support streaming data from all bikes sending information simultaneously.

They would also like to be able to make an analysis of the data sent by the bicycles to find popular routes and thus be able to exploit areas that their users usually visit and expand the number of collection points.

Finally, because they are not yet 100% sure that Google’s solution may be the best one, they would like to avoid vendor lock-in whenever possible.

GCP choices

With this current situation and requirements in mind, we are going to analyze the best oWith this current situation and requirements in mind, we are going to analyze the best options GCP can offer to achieve the goals.

Compute choice

These are the alternatives of compute engines in GCP:

Because one of the goals they want to achieve is to break its monolithic application into smaller independent services, we have to think of a solution compatible with microservices. In the case of GCP, it can be “App Engine”, “GKE”, or even “Cloud Functions”. But because it is not an event-driven application and they want to use open-source tools to avoid vendor lock-in the most suitable solution will be Kubernetes.

Network choice

These are the main components offered by GCP in terms of networking:

Because this is a regional company that doesn’t want to expand its business due to the logistic cost. It will only require a VPC that has a unique subnet in the western Europe region. In this network, we have to define firewall rules that only allow HTTP traffic because the communication between the services will use this protocol. And also we will need to define an HTTP load balancer that will be used by “GKE” as an ingress controller to work as an entry point for all the internet requests.

Storage choice

These are the alternatives of Datastores in GCP:

Regarding the requirements, there are two clear storage use cases. One of them will store relational data such as user and bicycle information and the other will store the stream of location data sent by the bikes when they are moving. 

For the first one, the best option is to use Cloud SQL with a PostgreSQL implementation because it is exactly the same as the one they are using currently. 

For the second one, the best option is “Cloud Big Table” because it is very performant and it is specially designed to store time-series data, moreover, it is compatible with HBase API,this way all the tools that can be used to access and process the data could be used in another HBase implementation avoiding vendor lock-in.

Data processing choice

These are the alternatives of Data processing tools in GCP:

To meet the requirements of data processing, we have two options, the first one is very easy to configure and very performant, and the second is based on open-source in order to avoid the vendor lock-in. 

In the first case, we can use BigQuery, a very powerful analytic tool to process terabytes of data in seconds using SQL. On the other hand, if we don’t want to use any Google-specific technology, we can use any open-source tool that can be used to process data stored in an HBase database like Drill, Impala or Hive.

As we can see, migrating to public cloud has a lot of advantages in terms of cost and elasticity, and if you choose GCP in particular you could take advantage of many features that make this choice more favorable than others offered by its competitors. 

In addition to this, we have seen what some of the options in terms of computing are , data store and network offered by Google and what the best choices regarding the requirements of a particular use case are.

Also, it is worth noting that you can test GCP for free for 3 months thanks to the free tier offered by Google to make some POCs before paying for it.

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MONETA Money Bank: Taking the digital lead

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Call for change

MONETA’s aging, on-premises infrastructure prevented it from introducing new products and services quickly.

Meanwhile, the costs of keeping its legacy IT up and running continued to rise, delaying the bank from reallocating investments on innovation in other areas. MONETA needed to rethink its IT infrastructure to set itself apart from competitors and provide clients with the modern digital services they desired.

The bank recognized the need for a new IT strategy to keep up with ever-evolving client needs. It sought to embrace one that would infuse agility and responsiveness into its IT operations and position the bank as the digital leader in the Czech Republic banking sector.

MONETA required a flexible, cost-effective cloud-based IT infrastructure that aligned with the bank’s strategic ambitions and laid the groundwork for continued growth.

MONETA Money Bank

But the bank recognized the need for a new IT strategy to keep up with ever-evolving client needs. One that would infuse agility and responsiveness into its IT operations and position the bank as the digital leader in the Czech Republic banking sector.

When tech meets human ingenuity

MONETA partnered with Accenture to define a new, comprehensive IT strategy rooted in the belief that cloud computing could deliver the IT agility MONETA was in the market for. They chose AWS as the target cloud ecosystem that best suited the bank’s digital agenda.

Accenture assisted with AWS solution deployment

We helped design and the deploy the AWS environment before guiding the migration of 200 of the bank’s applications. Our experience with large-scale migrations, cloud migration tools and capabilities, along with our long-standing partnership with AWS, provided MONETA with the desired experience and knowledge.

We assessed all migration risks

MONETA tapped Accenture cloud experts and resources from the Accenture AWS Business Group. A joint MONETA/Accenture team assessed the risks of migration to plan for a quick, seamless and efficient deployment. Regulatory risks were given special consideration, and all cloud-related regulations were followed.

We reviewed the relevant applications

In total, two hundred applications were reviewed and prioritized. We reviewed the servers they ran on, their architecture, the characteristics of related workloads, and the computing capacity each application consumed.

We guided the first wave of applications

The first wave included 20 high-priority applications, such as one for getting cash to ATMS. The whole migration took less than five months, with no disruption to services. As we strategized with MONETA, we brought our deep IT skills, unrivalled industry experience and strong reputation for financial institution IT transformation to the table.

A valuable difference

Thanks to its new flexible and secure cloud-based infrastructure, MONETA can now meet the changing needs of customers and evolving market conditions with ease.

MONETA’s new capabilities are accelerating and automating development processes and continually improving the customer experience.

The bank can now innovate quicker, with a flexible and secure infrastructure that supports the sustainable growth of its services. Its developers are more agile and can develop new products and services as needed.

Looking ahead, Accenture will support MONETA’s goal to reduce its data center footprint and run up to 50 percent of its applications in the cloud. This will free the bank to regularly refocus investment towards innovation and its digital services.

The company has ensured it will be the No. 1 provider of digital banking services in the Czech Republic and has set a shining example for other banks in Europe to follow.

MONETA can now innovate quicker, with a flexible and secure infrastructure that supports the growth of its services. The bank’s developers are more agile and can develop new products and services as needed.

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