HBP – Cloud Migration

Executive summary

Harvard Business Publishing with Enquizit’s support embarked upon the task of migrating their infrastructure from a combination of onsite and collocated facilities to AWS.  Improved scalability, reliability, security and cost were some of the core business goals for the migration.  Enquizit embedded with Harvard’s internal resources to migrate the entire data center in six months using Amazon’s Cloud Adoption Framework and Agile delivery framework.

Business Challenge / Problem Detail

HBP was moving to a new campus where server room space was expensive and limited.  While the real estate requirement was one of the main business drivers, HBP had the following key business needs:

Output / Our Solution

Enquizit embedded with Harvard’s internal resources to migrate the entire data center in six months using Amazon’s Cloud Adoption Framework and Agile delivery framework. Enquizit worked closely with HBP & Amazon to assess current infrastructure and develop a baseline architecture optimized for security, reliability, performance, cost optimization, and operational excellence.

Our team ported over 600 hundred servers and 125 application. 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. These tools & process ensured accountability, productivity, and quality.

Enquizit established a migration pipeline in collaboration with HBR’s internal personnel. Our engagement start with triaging applications by readiness and suitability and then identified patterns based on technology stacks to enhance efficiency. One-to-one replacements for logging, recoverability, monitoring, alerting and security solutions were established and embedded in all stacks and instances. Development and Test environments were moved to AWS. Quality assurance ensured acceptable and predictable functionality before production environment move was scheduled. Production environments were built and cut over to at scheduled down times. Decommission team then shutdown data center hosted environments for migrated applications.

Enquizit Role

Cloud Team at Enquizit assisted HBP 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 Technology)

Expected Challenges

Since this effort was one of the first “enterprise level all-in” migration, the technical uncertainties involved paired with the tight timeline was a huge concern.  A comprehensive risk assessment and mitigation plan contributed heavily to the success.

Client:

Harvard Business Publishing

Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) is a world renowned not-for-profit publishing company with a large digital footprint.

Industry:

Education

Problem Statement

HBP faced cost escalation & operational issues in maintaining its 600+ server infrastructure. Improving the state of its current infrastructure with respect to Security, Reliability, Scalability and Operations while achieving cost reduction was essential.

Goals and Benefits

Our solution resulted in lowered costs, simplified Operations, improved Scalability, reliable Business Continuity implementation, enhanced SLAs and reduced time to market.

These results empowered HBP to achieve better customer satisfaction and customer retention rates.

Core Partners:

Amazon Web Services (AWS)