Cloud Migration Reduced The TCO of A Document Services Giant by 20%

The customer is a trusted partner and leading provider of quality document services & communications. Solutions provided by the customer include multichannel marketing solutions, mobile and cloud solutions, business process management solutions, and world-class multifunction devices for use in offices.

The customer was looking for moving from their legacy systems to the cloud and approached Blazeclan for guiding and implementing their cloud migration process. The cloud migration involved their offices from Singapore, Philippines, and Thailand. The complete migration portfolio of the customer involved 25+ servers/VMs, active directory (AD), and mail exchange.

Challenges Put Forth by Customer

The timeline of the cloud migration was a big challenge for the customer, as the entire migration was to be completed within one and a half month’s time. Post this time span, the customer was supposed to end their contract of physical data center and move to the cloud. In case they had to renew their contract of physical data center, the customer would have suffered from a substantial financial impact.

The complete migration of the mail exchange and AD was a crucial challenge to be addressed within the proposed time frame. All of the customer’s applications were tightly coupled with the mail exchange and AD, which compelled their migration prior to any other cloud transition process. The users of these applications were segregated across over three countries. There was limited time to carry out a detailed assessment, which necessitated the adoption of a complete Lift & Shift strategy along with a lot of assumptions.

Blazeclan-NetFoundry’s Collaborative Cloud Migration Solution for Customer

Blazeclan used NetFoundry zero trust security based AWS cloud connectivity solution on Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) model.. In association with our partner, NetFoundry, we implemented a software-based network solution for data transfer and migration from on-premise to AWS. This was chosen as an alternative to the expensive and time consuming Direct Connect or VPN.

The Complete Migration Process for the Customer Involved

• CloudEndure Migration was chosen as the tool for the lift & shift migration of all servers except for the AD and mail exchange.

• For AD and mail exchange, a complete rebuild and re-installation approach was adopted. This is because the configuration changes and a lift and shift with CloudEndure Migration was not possible for AD and mail exchange.

• A PoC was conducted first in a non-production environment and then a detailed runbook for production was prepared for the actual implementation.

• A big bang approach was taken for production migration over a weekend after AD and exchange were migrated. No major issues were reported after the migration.

• Cost optimization was taken up later on as a formal assessment was not conducted because of the priority of migration to AWS. After cost optimization on AWS, the total cost of ownership came down by 2/3rd of the first month’s cost.

Benefits Achieved by the Customer

High Scalability: As this was the customer’s first move to the cloud, the migration provided the customer with the ability to scale their infrastructure according to the business demand alterations. Cloud migration enabled a new auto-scaling feature with minimum or zero downtime.

Improved Performance: The customer experience was significantly enhanced with the cloud migration, owing to the scalable and agile nature of the deployment compared to their legacy on-premise deployment.

Cost Optimization: Cloud migration opened up the possibility of optimizing cost for the customer along with building a future-ready and fault-tolerant architecture. The pay-as-you-go model suits well with the customer’s portfolio in Singapore, as their IT footprint there has been small, which facilitated the management. The benefit of cost optimization enabled the customer to have a better control of their overall IT budget.

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