Rapid Cloud Migration for Financial Crime Management

Following an acquisition, the customer needed to support divestment and migrate their vast on-premise and cloud-based platforms away from the support of the selling company. This included exiting the selling company’s data centres (DCs). These platforms encompassed AWS Accounts, Azure Subscriptions, on-premise Oracle databases, and on-premises VMware-hosted VMs. Due to the agreements in place between the customer and their selling company, this complex multi-cloud migration project had to conclude before the end of Q2 2023 to avoid incurring increased costs related to the incumbent support arrangements. They also required a Managed Service for the platforms being migrated from the selling company to support their global operation and business continuity.

In Q1 2023, Version 1 were engaged to complete a portfolio discovery assessment of the technology estate. This discovery encompassed the AWS, Oracle, VMware, and Azure platforms. Each of these platforms were assessed during a series of focussed workshops, and automated assessment technology and functional/non-functional requirements were determined as part of these workshops.

The outputs of the Discovery Phase included:

• A holistic view and inventory of services and platform to be migrated
• High Level Designs for VMware Cloud on AWS, Amazon RDS for Oracle Azure Landing Zone and AWS Landing Zone.
• Project planning including delivery and scheduling for further design, deployment, migration and transition to managed services support for VMware, Oracle, AWS and Azure platforms.

Due to the expiration of agreements related to operational support, a key requirement was to exit the Data Centres before the end of Q2 2023.

Most technology partners would typically take a year to migrate a complex technology estate like this. However, working with the customer, Version 1 reduced migration time by 50% and worked towards a full migration in 6 months.

Version 1 prioritised activities to accelerate deployment of the migration targets and conducted an analysis of the requirements, identified the migration imperatives for deployment of cloud-based infrastructure in AWS and Azure and used our Accelerator Service Offerings to shorten deployment timelines. This enabled us to plan deployment and migrations and to mobilise appropriately sized teams for each of the four identified workstreams. Version 1 rapidly flexed the size of the project teams based on demand and parallel operation.

Due to the multi-cloud nature of the migration, each of the four workstreams had a dedicated team – Azure, AWS, Oracle, and VMware. Version 1 integrated each cloud platform with Okta, the custome’ centralised Identity Management Solution. An overarching layer of governance and control was positioned to align across the entire migration programme by Version 1.

AWS

To expedite the deployment of the target architecture, we leveraged our Multi-Region AWS Landing Zone Service Offering which provided a secure, scalable, and highly available solution to migrate the AWS accounts. A key feature of our Landing Zone Service Offering is the self-service functionality, such as the Account Vending capability, allowing application teams to procure accounts on-demand. The Landing Zone solution enables application scalability, modularity, and security guardrails out of the box, helping to accelerate migrations in a secure manner. Using this approach, Version 1 were able to ensure the migration of the 24 mission-critical accounts, with 2800+ EC2 instances, 3400+ EBS volumes and all the peripheral cloud platform services with zero downtime or impact to the customer and their end users.

As a Premier Consulting Partner, we leveraged our AWS Partnership and were in continuous communication with AWS ensuring that we leaned on our shared experience and expertise. Version 1 followed best practices and the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) as a framework for the migration.

VMware Cloud on AWS

The customer needed a solution that would allow a speedy migration of 400+ Virtual Machines to meet the aggressive DC exit timeline. VMware Cloud on AWS offered this solution and met customer requirements of speed and a limited interruption to their in-house support teams. To migrate at velocity, the Version 1 Migration Factory was used to migrate VMs from three global data centres – Australia, USA, and Europe, using VMware’s HCX technology. The Version 1 Migration Factory completed all migrations within 15 working days. An average of 25.5 migrations per day, with a total data migration of 55TB. The average downtime was limited to 10 minutes.

Azure

To start the delivery process with Azure, Version 1 designed and deployed an Azure Landing Zone for the customer to host Azure subscriptions. The main challenge here lay in integrating each of their subscriptions within the Landing Zone and ensuring all data and services were kept secure.

Version 1 has developed its Azure automated Landing Zone technology for customers transitioning to Azure in a Hub and Spoke Architecture. This provides a seamless and straightforward transition with minimal downtime. The customer identified three Azure Subscriptions to be migrated to their newly deployed Landing Zone. These were completed using repeatable processes, automation for the migration and secure validation of each subscription.

Oracle Database Migration

Our customer needed a solution that would minimise administrative overhead and allow the preservation of existing Oracle database versions, avoiding time-consuming and costly database upgrades. There was also a preference for PaaS over IaaS. Amazon RDS Custom for Oracle was the most appropriate solution to meet these requirements, reducing administration overhead and supporting the database versions in scope for migration. Version 1 designed and deployed six Oracle RDS Custom instances in line with customer requirements and migrated all Oracle databases to these targets. In addition to the database migrations, we enabled automated backups, and the ability to perform point-in-time restores along with deploying integrated CloudWatch dashboards for database observability.

Okta Integration

To centralise identity, Okta was used as the Identity Provider (IDP) solution across all platforms and services. We ensured that all newly created resources (AWS Landing Zone, VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure Landing Zone) and migrated applications would integrate with this solution seamlessly. Version 1 worked with the customer to configure integrations between each of the newly created platforms and Okta, allowing them to manage authorisation and authentication from a single centralised control plane. This provided a consistent and transparent authentication experience for our customers’ end users.

Version 1 ASPIRE Managed Services

Following delivery of the migration, Version 1 transitioned the operate and run services to our ASPIRE Managed Services capability. By leveraging our expertise, scalability, and efficiency, the customer will enhance their operations and focus on core competencies, leading to increased productivity and growth.

• Use of Version 1’s complete value chain technology capabilities including Advisory, Architecture, AWS, Azure, Database, Migration and Managed Services
• Complete migration time reduced by 50% from 12 to 6 months
• Rapid scaling of teams and workstreams to operate parallel technology migrations
• Ensuring security and integration of identity provider services with Okta
• Seamless transition to Version 1 ASPIRE Managed Services