CASE STUDY

Public Sector e-Learning Provider: a new Azure environment

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.

Helping one million public sector staff deliver better outcomes

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).

e-Learning Provider

Services

Azure
Managed Services
Professional Services
Cloud Migration
Licensing

Industry

Public Sector

Organisation size

More than one million users

Completion Date

March 2019

Challenge

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.

Approach

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.

Solution

Moved the servers that power the storage and accessibility of the client’s virtual learning environment and resources from AWS over to Azure virtual machines (VMs).
Leveraged our Azure Landing Zone IP to automate the setup of a secure and scalable Azure environment, which meant our client was all set to commence the migration phase of the project in a matter of days.
Operating systems we migrated to Azure during the project included Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2 and 2016, as well as Linux.
The cloud migration was carried out in accordance with our methodology and completed seamlessly in time for the Monday morning go-live deadline, saving time and money.

Outcomes

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.

The Future

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:

build in additional availability options to address spikes in demand
access the latest security features
scale its service based on real-time usage
allow for even greater scale than the current environment
speed up application deployment reducing costs further

"We are already working together on the next phase of our project to implement PaaS services such as Azure DevOps, Azure Web Apps and Azure SQL and, with a recently announced facelift to our e-Learning platform, we know we can depend on them to help us deliver this with success."

Senior Support Analyst

Client

Products and Services

Azure migration services
Azure Landing Zone
Azure licensing
Azure platform support, monitoring and management
Windows and SQL rehosting on Azure

"What really impressed us was the in-depth, bona fide knowledge of Azure demonstrated at our first encounter and which we soon realised permeated the entire team. Coupled with its extensive understanding of public sector requirements and its impressive Microsoft Partner accreditations, we emerged from our rigorous tender process with the utmost confidence that this was the right partner for us."

Senior Support Analyst

Client

Our Impact

Take a look at some of the results that stood out for Tysers.

months to deliver a new Azure environment

25 %

cost reductions through Azure

24/7

monitoring and alerting

Let’s find out how we can help you

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.