Client background:
US Based Apparel player having approx. 150 store outlets, plus online presence. It specializes in its own niche brand plus other brands. They had an in-house Data Centre and Saksoft worked with them to identify areas of IT optimization, develop Cloud plans, and then migrate.
Business Challenge
- Infrastructure, Platforms, Applications and Operations on premise were not stabilized, Absence of concrete IT and Cloud Roadmap
- Lacked End to End architecture information and documentation about interdependencies between Applications, Infrastructure and Business
- Indefinite delays in implementing changes, ever increasing CAPEX and OPEX, IT Productivity issues
- No details available about the Technology stack and how IT can augment the Business, there was no DR and the single Data Centre was a point of failure
Business Solution
- Detailed discovery and assessment of IT (People, Process and Technology) and Business Requirements
- Identified IT Optimization opportunities (Applications, Infrastructure and Platforms)
- Developed a detailed Business case and TCO analysis (Redesign On-Premise vs Public Cloud – Azure/AWS vs Private Nutanix Cloud)
- Finalized Microsoft Azure and O365 as the IT and Data Centre Transformation Levers
- Produced Cloud First Strategy, IT Cloud adoption roadmap, Assessment Blueprint and Baseline Architecture and To-be Cloud Design, including areas of rationalization and simplification
Implementation
- Azure Migrate Platform was deployed to understand Application, Platform and Infrastructure Dependencies, Service and Port Mapping, to build a detailed Migration Plan on Azure
- Baseline Azure Cloud Foundation with added Security Layer was implemented
- Azure Site Recovery was used to migrate Infrastructure, Applications, Platforms & Databases phased wise
- Technology stack involving 20 plus applications and 50 plus Infrastructure instances
Business Benefits
- Successfully delivered from offshore
- Optimized the Applications from 20 to 12
- Optimized the Infrastructure from 50 plus on-premise to around 35 instances on Azure
- Optimized Datawarehouse and few other databases from 9 to 4 in 2 servers on Azure
- Cost savings of around 20-30% realized
- Best practices were implemented along with DR
- Robust IT documentation was published for easy reference later
- Phased wise migration strategy and roll out plan was highly appreciated, as there was no business impact
- Used Azure VM, Azure SQL Database, Availability Set, Load Balancer etc.