A state transport agency achieved scalability and cost optimisation with AWS cloud, along with a seamless exit from its data centres, thanks to Kinetic IT’s AWS orchestration.
Problem
A state transport agency needed to reduce its data centre footprint to unlock cost efficiencies and meet environmental objectives set by its board.
Solution
Kinetic IT orchestrated the customer’s move to the AWS cloud through careful planning and a thorough understanding of the customer’s needs.
Outcome
The customer has a stable cloud environment, enabling the retirement of its data centres and a move to scalable consumption-based modelling, achieving cost optimisation with AWS cloud.
Customer Background
The customer – a public transportation agency – has provided state-wide regional public transport services for nearly 30 years. Providing nearly 2,000 rail services and 1,500 coach services each week, the customer is integral in supporting and serving regional communities and linking these communities with interstate hubs across Australia. Kinetic IT has partnered with the customer since 2012, providing end-to-end ICT services.
The customer needed to move its entire on-premises data centre footprint to the AWS cloud, in line with its ICT Strategy. Kinetic IT was entrusted with planning and executing this move.
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The Problem
The customer had been operating with two primary data centres and had an objective to exit one as soon as possible to:
- Support the attainment of environmental objectives set by the board.
- Avoid further capital expenditure (CapEx) hardware refresh costs.
- Transition expensive software renewal costs to hyperscale cloud-procured licensing.
- Re-invest cost-savings into other areas of the business.
The legacy of the application stack held its own challenges. Many of the core applications had no vendor support agreements and minimal installation documentation, while a significant percentage were end-of-life.
The customer engaged Kinetic IT to orchestrate its cloud services across the application stack, streamline the overall migration process, and achieve cost optimisation with AWS cloud.
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The Solution
Kinetic IT utilised several AWS-endorsed migration approaches, allowing the customer to migrate legacy applications to the cloud without needing to refactor them. By adopting a cloud development lifecycle process for determining the type of migration approach, Kinetic IT could ensure legacy applications would continue to function while concurrently building new applications to replace the old ones within AWS.
Adopting a risk-averse strategy, Kinetic IT undertook the migration of multi-tier critical business systems by actively collaborating with all stakeholders, including suppliers. As always, Kinetic IT’s primary focus was to ensure successful outcomes for the customer whilst managing the budget and time challenges presented by the business case.
As this was a far-reaching and fundamental shift into a modernised, consumable application environment, significant effort was undertaken to consolidate duplicate applications and update supporting business processes through:
- Cost profiling across all the workloads to determine the run rate and potential cost reduction against current operational expenditure (OpEx) and capital expenditure (CapEx), and achieve maximum cost optimisation with AWS cloud.
- Analysis of current licensing utilisation versus the license structure within the AWS cloud.
- A migration roadmap utilising the 7-R’s framework (Retire, Retain, Rehost, Relocate, Repurchase, Replatform, Refactor) and what can be shifted in which migration wave.
- Design and deployment of an AWS landing zone and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to ensure the migration of an entire data centre can be done at scale.
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The Outcome
The transition to AWS has enabled the customer to meet the key objectives of its ICT strategy. By moving from on-premises to cloud-based services, the customer’s IT resources have the scalability and elasticity necessary to meet the fluctuating demands of its fluid business model.
This, paired with the adoption of consumption-based modelling, enables the customer to rapidly respond to changing business requirements. As the customer now only pays for the resources they utilise, they maintain full cost optimisation with AWS cloud. In addition to facilitating cost control, the customer can avoid the need to accurately predict its long-term IT resource needs and make pre-emptive investments in supporting hardware.
Guided by Kinetic IT’s expertise, the customer’s environment was configured correctly the first time. This enabled them to exit their data centres and meet environmental objectives set by the board by reducing the physical infrastructure the business had relied upon to operate.
In addition to the immediate cost and environmental objectives outlined in the business case, the customer’s move to the cloud has resulted in further benefits, including:
- Significantly reduced the risk of a cyber incident by applying AWS’ Security by Design approach.
- Increased agility and flexibility to respond to changing business needs.
- Shifting to Anything as a Service (XaaS) models to unlock further cost efficiencies and access the latest features of subscription-based services.
- Faster innovation through quicker development cycles and integration with cutting-edge technologies.
- Simplifying IT by reducing infrastructure complexity and providing opportunities for automation.
- Improved stability and performance through reliable infrastructure, scalability, and monitoring and management tools.
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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.
