An IVY-University – Cloud Migration

Executive summary

IVY-University has a commitment to retire existing data centers and free the space for other uses as soon as possible. Thousands of distinct critical environment had be moved while ensuring continual availability of services for academics, administrative support and research. As an Amazon Web Services referral, Enquizit began services to assist IVY-University to realize the transformative benefits of the Cloud with increased resource capacity and capabilities

Business Challenge / Problem Detail

While there is a cloud first directive for new application, a substantial amount of effort was expected to be required to move existing applications. With long term maintainability in mind, IVY-University decided to shift to a ‘build fresh infrastructure and move data’ migration path. That path allows for implementing updated security controls, monitoring & logging components and standardized recovery protocols. Management’s goals for the migration initiative were the following:

Get out of the traditional data-center management activities and focus on their core business

Recover prime real estate in Cambridge for business instead of running a data center in them

Improve Scalability, DR, Business Continuity, SLA and time to market

Preserve capital by switching from CAPEX to OPEX model and pay only for what they use

Improve security, reliability and monitoring using standardized tools and process

Automate infrastructure and code deployment

Output / Our Solution

Enquizit embedded with IVY-University’s internal resources to migrate the workloads using Amazon’s Cloud Adoption Framework and Agile delivery framework. Enquizit worked closely with IVY-University & Amazon to assess current infrastructure and develop a baseline architecture optimized for security, reliability, performance, cost optimization, and operational excellence.

The team ported over 50 application with 3 environments each. Enquizit aided in finalizing the base architecture that met IVY-University’s security, governance and compliance needs. We introduced “infrastructure as code” concept using automation tools such as; Cloud Formation Templates and Boot Strap scripts. These tools ensured accountability, productivity, and quality. Workloads were migrated using end-to-end automation while implementing tight security controls, monitoring & logging components, standardized backup protocols, load balancing and Auto Scaling capabilities. Enquizit established a migration pipeline in collaboration with IVY-University’s business, development and operations personnel. We started with a discovery and analysis phase to quickly sort applications by readiness and suitability and then grouped applications with similar stacks to enhance efficiency. Development and Test environments were moved to AWS and quality assurance ensured acceptable and predictable functionality before production environment move was scheduled. Production environments were built and cut over at scheduled down times. Enquizit personnel led or assisted in the following key migration activities:

Current State Assessment

Architecture Design and Validation

Automated migration implementation

Migration Roadmap Assistance

Agile delivery framework

Automation to provide Infrastructure as Code

Security Design

DR & Business Continuity Design

Governance Modeling and Implementation

Recommendation and Evaluation of Tools

Migration planning based on SLA and availability needs

Cost Optimization Recommendations

Risk monitoring and mitigation

Enquizit Role

Cloud Team at Enquizit assisted IVY-University in leveraging the cloud using low risk approaches and avoid costly mistakes. Using our proven migration framework the team built a secure, robust and optimized infrastructure by methodically stepping through requirement analysis, readiness assessment, cost analysis, design and implementation. We ensured success by deploying repeatable and automated processes based on a seasoned DevOps framework.

Tooling (Tools and Technologies)

EC2, VPC, EBS, S3, Glacier, Direct Connect, Cloud Formation Ansible, Git, Jenkins, Bash, JIRA, Confluence

Expected Challenges

Third party vendors not certifying AWS hypervisor as part of their stack in any shape or form (ORACLE, PeopleSoft)

Heavy technical debts of applications with limited resources to address them challenged the pipeline of migration workload.

Client:

IVY-University’ IT Department is responsible for the strategy, planning, and delivery of information technology across the University.

Industry:

Education
Problem Statement

IVY-University has a commitment to retire existing data centers and free the space for other uses as soon as possible. Thousands of distinct critical environment had be moved while ensuring continual availability of services for academics, administrative support and research.

Goals and Benefits

Get out of the traditional data-center management activities and focus on their core business

Improve Scalability, DR, Business Continuity, SLA and time to market

Preserve capital by switching from CAPEX to OPEX model and pay only for what they use

Improve security, reliability and monitoring using standardized tools and process

Automate infrastructure and code deployment

Core Partners:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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