ENGAGEMENT
One of the largest telecom providers in North America wanted to centralize private cloud capacity as part of an effort to consolidate regional data centers into its national data center footprint and reduce operating costs. DayBlink Consulting was engaged to design and orchestrate the migration of 400+ applications, including customer-facing applications, to several private and public cloud hosting solutions.
PROBLEM
The Cloud organization needed to evacuate a regional data center in less than a year while ensuring business continuity as many of the hosted applications directly supported customer-facing applications. There were several challenges that significantly increased the complexity of the migration: (1) there was no reliable source of truth for an application inventory, application owners, application-specific requirements, cloud platform requirements or application interdependencies (2) the applications and services lacked clear destinations due to infrastructure availability, security limitations and budget (3) the team had no solutions architect with institutional and cloud knowledge that was able to designate clear migration plans (4) there were ~80 individual application teams involved in the migration and (5) the only option to delay the migration deadline involved extending the property lease which was very expensive.
SOLUTION
DayBlink Consulting was engaged to migrate all applications in the regional data center so the Business could shut down the facility. We needed to understand what applications were in the data center, develop tailored application migration plans, migrate and validate application moves and remove the application footprint from the source infrastructure. This migration took shape through the following phases, including: (1) a discovery effort to develop an inventory of applications, application owners, application-specific requirements (e.g. geographic requirements, footprint, etc.) and interdependencies between applications; (2) evaluation of application requirements and determination of target platforms and locations; (3) tailored migration approaches fit for each application’s and service’s need (e.g., re-platforming, re-architecting, lift-and-shift, hybrid, etc.); (4) historical and forecasted application usage used to confirmed capacity availability at various target data center and platform location; (5) phased migration approach across all application to accommodate application interdependencies ensuring there were no connectivity impacts; (6) migration and onboarding of applications and services to deployed private and public cloud infrastructure; (7) removal of application footprint from the source infrastructure and validated operational continuity.
We launched and managed an awareness campaign to ensure clear and consistent communication (e.g. office hours, dedicated messaging channels and spaces, 1-on-1s, intranet update and more).
RESULT
80+ application teams collaborated to successfully migrate and exit 400+ virtualized applications, 12+ bare-metal applications and 3 partner organizations from the regional data center without impacting business continuity or uptime. Application teams migrated and onboarded to new cloud hosting solutions including AWS, VMware and OpenStack. The client maintained a new “source of truth” application database which included application profiles (capturing application descriptions, owner information, dependencies, requirements, and more).