ISED Canada

Synopsis

Innovation, Science & Economic Development (ISED) Canada is a significant federal institution of the Canadian government, which has a mandate of building an innovative and competitive knowledge-based Canadian economy. ISED’s portfolio includes seventeen different Canadian federal departments that work together to achieve government’s goal of building a knowledge-based economy in all regions of Canada and generate high-growth job opportunities.

Enquizit, in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), successfully conducted a detailed ‘Migration Readiness Planning’ (MRP) exercise for ISED in under three months, an engagement that typically takes 4-5 months for an organization of similar size

Initial State

Enquizit was primarily engaged by AWS to conduct the Discovery, Operations and Pilot Migrations Workstreams of the MRP process in tandem with AWS, who lead the engagement otherwise. The MRA (Migration Readiness Assessment) for this client identified quite a few challenges across all MRP streams; the relevant ones to Enquizit’s scope are listed below:

Lack of hands-on AWS experience within ISED’s resources.

Lack of centralized configuration management data or other inventory.

No candidate applications identified for Pilot Migrations.

Lack of a Migration Plan.

Lack of Cloud-Ready operational runbooks and playbooks.

Enquizit’s Solution

Enquizit worked alongside ISED and AWS to mitigate each of the gaps identified above. This project was successfully closed with the following highlights from Enquizit’s side:

Proposed a tentative project plan for migration based on the prioritized list of applications.

Successful identification and pilot migration of 5 applications proving the value created by moving those applications to the cloud.

Identification of appropriate migration patterns based on ISED’s asset portfolio. Leverage CloudEndure to perform the migration. Enquizit provided architectural guidelines and support for applications that needed refactoring such as utilization of a Container platform (OpenShift) to host applications and to migrate Oracle workloads to Postgres.

Successful Discovery of ISED’s Application portfolio.

Provided a customized server inventory data collection template and trained the relevant resources to help them collect missing data from relevant application owners.

Provided comprehensive documentation on Operations, including relevant runbooks and playbooks.

Challenges

As a federal organization, ISED has strict security and privacy requirements, which were kept in mind at all times. Enquizit worked with ISED and AWS to select applications that did not contain any classified information, and those who fulfilled the identified migration patterns. Enquizit also worked around the lack of VPN connectivity between ISED and AWS for pilot migrations, which was under process during the time of the MRP engagement.

The main challenge for the Discovery workstream included lack of an automated tool for Discovery, which was not used on client’s request due to security and privacy concerns. Enquizit’s team worked around this challenge by working closely with ISED’s resources, including application owners, to extract and gather relevant information as much as possible.

Benefits

Despite the above challenges, ISED’s resources are now better prepared to carry out cloud migrations. This project has added significance as this was the first time a federal organization of this size from Canada engaged with AWS for its cloud migration needs. The successful delivery of this project bodes well for the future of cloud usage among Canadian federal organizations.

Client:

Migration Readiness Planning (MRP)

Customer:

Innovation, Science & Economic Development (ISED), Canada

Project Duration:

January 2019 – April 2019

Prime & Partners:

AWS & Enquizit

Core Partners: