Client Profile

Sector: Engineering

Our customer is a Professional Body for Engineers providing CPD training and standards of professional engineering and education.

Version 1 supported the customer with the migration of a bespoke core business CRM system to the Public Cloud

Business Driver for Cloud

The customer uses a core business bespoke CRM system called Memsys. This is a dedicated centralised membership system that allows the management of current and new members through a member lifecycle from initial application.
In recent times, the underlying hardware of the application on production and UAT had reached end of life and was in need of renewal to ensure reliability, support and performance. The customer requested Version 1 to provide a robust solution to re-platform Memsys.
Version 1 took into account that Memsys would grow over the next number of years and may be driven by legislation, business or customer requirements. This requirement meant that the solution required performance, availability, scalability and flexibility.

Challenges

Some of the challenges involved in this project were to:
  • Create a new environment while upgrading the  application to newer technologies (Microsoft Operating System, Oracle)
  • Decouple the application and database layers for future flexibility
  • Design a highly available and fault tolerant system
  • Migrate the data and application to the new AWS environment
  • Ensure environment design could meet the requirements
  • Perform thorough system testing in UAT to validate new design and technologies Solution

Solution Proposed by Version 1

Version 1’s proposed solution was to build an environment in AWS with load balanced production web servers, a DB server with a standby DB server and Domain controllers for authentication fault tolerance.
Version 1 ensured the safe on-boarding of Public Cloud by implementing the Version 1 AWS reference architecture and building the firewall and monitoring on-top.  Once the environment was set up and verified, only then were the application and database servers built and data transferred.
The process involved:
  • Setup of Version 1 Reference Architecture in AWS (with monitoring and firewalls).
  • Installation and configuration of web and database server (production, standby, and UAT).
  • Installation and configuration of PHP, as well as the migration of application code to AWS environment.
  • Upgrade of databases from Oracle 11.1 to Oracle 11.2.
  • Managed Services Support and management of the database, application and operating systems.
The migration took place in two steps:
  • Build a secure environment in the AWS Public Cloud for the customer based on the Version 1 Reference Architecture, setup and configure systems.
  • Perform UAT/integration testing, and migration.

Real Business Benefits Delivered

  • No hardware capital expense, no need to purchase new hardware for an infrastructure refresh
  • Scalability, the ability to scale out in the future.
  • Availability, increased availability in the event of a disaster.
  • Ability to reuse existing Oracle licensing.