A public sector department achieved a fast and flawless cloud migration and digital transformation with cost and operational efficiencies, thanks to Kinetic IT’s VMware Cloud on AWS solution.
Problem
A public sector department needed to consolidate the separate ICT environments of each legacy agency and adopt new cloud technology to unlock cost and operational efficiencies, within urgent time constraints.
Solution
Kinetic IT determined VMware Cloud on AWS was the best choice to host the department’s non-production environments. We delivered a cloud migration using a ‘lift and shift’ approach, ensuring applications would run as expected post-migration.
Outcome
Kinetic IT’s VMware Cloud on AWS solution enabled the swift retirement of on-premises infrastructure and the reduction of their data centre footprint while improving productivity and establishing a foundation for future transformation.
Customer Background
The customer – a public sector department – was formed as part of a state government initiative to amalgamate various agencies and departments delivering common services and functions into a single department.
The newly established department was tasked with identifying efficiency opportunities facilitated by the merger, which included consolidating the separate ICT environments of each legacy agency and adopting cloud technology to unlock further cost and operational efficiencies.
Many of the department’s application and service workloads were operating on aged hardware that was at capacity or approaching end of life, which restricted the amount of benefit the department could gain through consolidation activities. In addition, the department was required to exit three of its five data centres within a 12-month period and needed a cloud environment that could take on the workloads that these data centres were hosting.
Kinetic IT delivered a solution that addressed the short-term need to reduce their data centre footprint and established a foundation for future transformation.
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The Solution
Kinetic IT worked in close consultation with a broad set of stakeholders across the organisation to rapidly migrate a significant portion of the department’s environment while still effectively managing complexity, scale, and risk. This was important for ensuring the department’s critical services were not disrupted during this period of change.
After a thorough analysis of each legacy department’s environment, and available solutions in the market and their costings, Kinetic IT determined that VMware Cloud on AWS was the best choice to host the department’s non-production environments. Approximately 90% of the department’s workloads were running on VMware platforms, and VMware Cloud on AWS provides a seamless transition between VMware-based on-premises infrastructure and the AWS cloud.
This solution enabled Kinetic IT and the department to migrate its test, development, and pre-production environments using a ‘lift and shift’ approach – where applications are migrated without the need to reconfigure them first. This approach allowed the department to meet its urgent time constraints and ensure applications would run as expected post-migration.
Kinetic IT performed detailed architectural planning and evaluation prior to the migration of any services to ensure the resultant environment was configured appropriately. This involved a thorough understanding of the department’s applications and mapping their interrelations and dependencies, which is crucial for reducing risk and achieving success in a complex enterprise environment. The resulting architecture allowed a swift migration of locally hosted applications into the cloud.
The project encapsulated services across multiple data centres and both intra-agency and cross-agency systems which supplied services to all the department’s 6,750 users and 75 sites. The result for the department was a fast, flawless migration of 200 workloads over 44 days to the VMware Cloud on AWS environment.
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The Outcome
The VMware Cloud on AWS solution has given the department the best of both worlds; Enabling the retirement of on-premises infrastructure, whilst establishing a foundation for future transformation.
The solution addressed the immediate requirement of relieving the burden on existing infrastructure, which has reduced risk and enabled the department to meet its requirement to exit three of its data centres. Through this process, Kinetic IT and the department identified numerous opportunities for further consolidation of infrastructure across the newly integrated departments, enabling additional cost and operational efficiencies.
With this urgent need addressed, the department now has the breathing room to focus on higher-value transformation efforts, such as rebuilding legacy applications to be cloud-native and taking advantage of AWS cloud services to elevate their organisation. The successful deployment of VMware Cloud on AWS achieved a range of outcomes for the department, including:
- Staff productivity gains.
- Enhanced application responsiveness due to architectural design catering to a geographically dispersed workforce.
- Increased resiliency and improved operational stability for essential applications.
- Higher quality user experience due to elastic availability of resources and accelerated performance of traditional applications in the cloud.
- A simplified future migration path to native AWS services.
- Alignment with government goals to reduce the level of agency-owned infrastructure assets.
- Efficient and effective consolidated platforms and infrastructure services.
- Accelerated platform establishment and migration facilitating the retirement of aged equipment and reduction of infrastructure risk.
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Find out more about how we partner with AWS to help Australian organisations securely transition to the cloud and succeed in today’s digital world.
