Cloud Migration: Consolidating Global Data Centres for Agility and Growth
Client
Financial Services
Technology
Windows SQL, PostgreSQL, Windows File Share
Summary
Industry: Financial Services
Core business: Services for asset managers, financial institutions, private clients and family offices
Number of Employees: 13,000
Geography: Worldwide
Workloads Migrated: SQL databases, Azure Logic Apps, Azure Lighthouse, key business web applications, MySQL
The challenge
The issue the customer faced was multiple data centres: some belonged to them initially, and others were inherited from acquisitions and all were located in various geographies around the globe and often managed independently. This presented a decentralised management and administration overhead with multiple ‘versions’ of the same or similar purpose applications and a complex lack of integration and collaboration across the business.
The solution
To integrate the various acquired entities, reduce the number of services and applications, and reduce the significant annual cost of data centre hosting, the customer enlisted Ergo to help exit the data centres, migrate the dispersed workloads and integrate the services on Microsoft’s cloud platform. To consistently scale, deliver measurable outcomes, and reduce the risk inherent in M&A-driven IT transformations, Ergo used its repeatable and proven migration and consolidation approach to cloud migrations, aligned with the Azure Well-Architected Framework.
In 2024, Ergo began with a comprehensive discovery, assessment and design, to understand the workloads, their configurations and inter-dependencies, for every entity that was consuming data centre services.
The discovery phase outputs included:
- Documenting of current architecture for each acquired organisation including any existing cloud services such as Microsoft Azure or AWS tenants and subscriptions.
- Designing an optimised Azure Landing Zone, ensuring alignment with Azure Well-Architected Framework principles.
- Providing costs breakdown
- Designing the appropriate migration model for each entity’s workloads, aligned with Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework.
Ergo has effectively completed the migration and consolidation of the workloads, including rehosting and refactoring of Windows SQL environments.
As the customer operates a multi-cloud environment, Ergo deployed Azure Arc as a centralised management and governance solution for Azure and co-existing AWS workloads. Using Azure Arc enabled the implementation of consistent security protocols and policies across the organisation. It provides a unified management experience for the entire IT environment.
The benefits
By consolidating its multiple, geographically dispersed data centers into Microsoft Azure, the customer achieved significant operational and strategic benefits. The migration eliminated redundant applications and decentralised management, streamlining IT operations and reducing costs and administrative overhead.
The adoption of Azure and Azure Arc provided a unified management platform, enabling consistent security protocols and centralised governance across the customer’s cloud environment.
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