Migration Case Study

NBS had inherited an environment through a company acquisition and the newly acquired company had a hard deadline to migrate their architecture from their previous parent company’s data centre into a public cloud with a 3-month time scale.

The challenge

NBS contacted Rebura to discuss a requirement to migrate their current multi-site environment into a public cloud, with AWS as their preferred Cloud Service Provider.

Part of the multi-site environment was inherited through the acquisition of another company and had a hard deadline of the end of October to migrate the company architecture from its original parent environment into an AWS environment, that was fit for purpose and cost effective.

The initial engagement focussed on re-hosting (“lift and shift”) the existing environment with modernisation and transformation forming phase two of the project. This case study focusses on the initial migration phase.

The key requirements were:

• Plan, design and implement the re-hosting migration of all in-scope workloads
• Consider “quick win” migrations to PaaS offerings where possible (Elasticsearch, RDS etc.)
• Outline expected costs of the running infrastructure and keep it as cost efficient as possible whilst building it in line with the Well Architected Framework

The Solution

Due the tight scales, Rebura completed a lift and shift of the existing environment. As the environment was predominantly Windows servers, we were able to access the Windows Rapid Migration funding to help offset the implementation costs.

Overview of the key deliverables:

Test Migrations
Utilising CloudEndure, we performed test migrations of applications along with dependencies well ahead of time. This allowed application owners to fully test applications prior to the final cutover date.

Migration Planning
Creation of migration plans on a per application or function basis. To include documented dependencies and expected timelines. Migration plans also include success criteria checklists and decommissions plans. We used this time to investigate any applications that can be improved from a high availability and resiliency perspective if this can be achieved with minimal effort.

Adopted and implemented a tagging strategy – as defined with NBS.

Centralised logging requirements.

Security
AWS access creation, least privileged security implementation, Key Management options.

Creation of detailed design documents
Specifying schematics, network schemes, security groups, rules, and lots more.

Application understanding
Workshops and knowledge sharing with application owners to understand applications and explore potential dependencies and linked workloads.

The results

Rebura successfully migrated the entire server estate of NBS’s acquired company, Glenigan, over a three-month period to meet the strict deadlines – achieved with minimal downtime.

In addition to the migration, Rebura have onboarded NBS to our managed service platform whilst we help upskill the internal team. This allows NBS unlimited access to our 24×7 pro-active monitoring & support service.

NBS are now in a bedding in period while Rebura rightsize the environment. After the rightsizing exercise, Rebura’s Cost Optimisation department will work alongside NBS to explore our free cost optimisation suite, CloudHealth & create a FinOps strategy.