Enterprise Hardware Refresh Avoidance
The Challenge
A regional government agency was preparing for the typical hardware refresh projects that are commonplace in enterprise IT groups, when a fresh CIO, with public cloud experience, asked the tough question: Have you really looked at cloud for this?
The Solution
Tidal Accelerator was used to perform a thorough analysis of the application system, including the automated analysis of source code, Oracle databases and business needs. This rapid assessment determined that a Replatform approach was not only possible, but was the cheaper, faster and more secure path to follow.
The Details
With this assessment in hand, the organization embraced its planning activities guided by the Migration Enablement Program to create their own Migration Factory with internal staff. The plan here called for agile teams to work together commencing with Sprint-0, creating landing zone automation with terraform (IaC - Infrastructure as Code), application server images with packer (immutable infrastructure) and finally testing data migration and cut-over processes iteratively with ansible (runbook automation).
Practicing agile for the implementation of the migration initiative, allowed the teams to demonstrate value to the business every two weeks. Iteratively developing and testing their data migration and cutover code, allowed the teams to prove that the migration approach was sound, before the scheduled migration weekend.
When completed, this application continued to be supported by the internal staff that were core to the migration team and now empowered with new cloud skills. This self-driven approach to cloud migration allows the organization to continue to improve and manage their applications long after the cloud migration is completed.
Source: IBM AIX, Windows Server, Oracle DB, Siebel, OPA, eBusiness Suite, WebLogic, WebSphere, Microsoft IIS
Technologies: Terraform, Packer, Consul, Ansible, RHEL
The Results
With our IBM hardware approaching the end of support, we faced a choice: spend $30mil on new hardware and a migration project, or start using the cloud. A Tidal assessment revealed that not only could we migrate to cloud successfully, we could also improve our operating model to increase agility and reduce our OpEx from almost $7M to $250K p.a.
– CIO, Government Agency
About Tidal
Tidal empowers organizations around the world to embrace the cloud as part of their digital transformation strategy. Our team delivers a scalable, multi-tenant platform, to support cloud transformation initiatives augmented by our best practices and our partners’ professional services.
Our mission is to demystify migration initiatives by making the complex straightforward.
Tidal is an AWS Advanced Tier Technology Partner, with Public Sector competency. Our service works with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
