CASE STUDY
With one million users requiring access to an ever-expanding library of more than 24,000 e-learning sessions, our client required a highly available, scalable platform to ensure it could meet both its existing and growing demands without issue.
Following a merger, our client needed to rationalise the IT departments of the two businesses. As part of this process, they decided to replace one AWS environment and move into the other’s Azure subscription and benefit from the cost savings offered through the existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA).
Industry:
Public sector
Organisation size:
More than one million users
Solutions:
Azure & cloud, managed services, professional services, cloud migration, licensing
Completion date:
March 2019
This change came at a time when the organisation was already feeling it had outgrown the support model with its existing hosting provider and was looking to gain more autonomy in managing its cloud applications and infrastructure.
With its cloud partner falling short of meeting its business needs and the organisational drive to adopt an Azure-only environment, the organisation prepared a rigorous tender process to seek a better fit solution and partner.
A key priority for the migration was to keep system downtime to an absolute minimum, given users could require access to its e-learning resources at any point in the week, day or night.
However, some components would need to be stopped during the migration process and transferring its mission critical database, along with sizeable assets, learning records and documents, would take a long time. All this meant that some downtime would be inevitable. To minimise downtime, the client’s entire Windows and Linux server estate would need to be moved across to the new Azure environment over the course of just one weekend.
The long-term ambition for the client is to move to a PaaS architecture, which will enable it to take advantage of containerisation and improve the e-learning experience for users via AI.
New Azure environment up and running in less than three months.
New platform that is more than capable of handling millions of training sessions for hundreds of thousands of users, at a fraction of the cost of its previous AWS environment.
Benefiting from the Microsoft EA the other organisation in the merger already had in place, it now has access to the latest cloud services and software licenses to keep abreast with the rapidly changing technology landscape, while also benefiting from volume discounts.
Transformed testing and production environments: the DevOps team can take a snapshot of the live environment and test proposed changes, making them more responsive while also powering innovation of services.
With Role Based Access Control to the environment, the DevOps team now has appropriate permissions in place to see servers that were previously inaccessible.
Senior Support Analyst
CLIENT
With its Azure solution in place and running smoothly, our client has already engaged with us to provide consultancy and delivery on the next phase of the project to move its applications over to a PaaS architecture enabling them to reap the benefits of services such as Azure DevOps, Azure Web Apps and Azure SQL to:
months to
deliver a new
Azure environment
cost reductions
through Azure
24/7
monitoring &
alerting
Senior Support Analyst
client
Whether you’re facing similar challenges to peers across your industry, or you have a unique need for something different – speak to us to find out what we can do.
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