EU agency moves to Azure Cloud and takes flexibility to the next level
The case of the full migration of a traditional private IaaS Data Center to Microsoft Azure at one of the renowned EU agency is a complete and Public Cloud-only use case.
Our client is an independent EU Authority that contributes to safeguarding the stability of the European Union's financial system by enhancing the protection of investors and promoting stable and orderly financial markets. Given the challenging nature of the business, our client wanted to enhance its infrastructure and make it more flexible and automated.
Α strategic project that aimed at addressing the business operations and reinforcing customers’ experience, workforce enablement, cyber security, agility and innovation in the context of the continued growth of its ICT needs with focus on time-to-market. Our client, had to cover the need of supporting an increasing number of systems and applications, a continuous growth in data demands, a larger staff and contractor base and a big number of customers across Europe.
Our client took the strategic decision to migrate all its existing ICT infrastructure and business applications to public cloud, selecting Microsoft Azure as a platform of choice.
The migration process was performed using automated provisioning of the IaaS, automatic configuration and Infrastructure-as-a-Code concept, ensuring upgrade and modernization of the entire infrastructure on the operating system and middleware layers, together with the actual data and services migration.
Azure environment is used as a single platform that offers a multitenant IaaS environment, based on a consumption-based model for production, development and UAT environments.
Microsoft Azure
The project was based on DevOps automation regarding VMs provisioning, οperating systems installation & configuration (including hardening), νetworking provisioning and configuration, databases provisioning, configuration and synchronization with sources, such as SharePoint using technologies such as Ansible, Azure DevOps, Microsoft Desired state Configuration, ARM templates.
The completion of the project was within the time frame set from the business stakeholders despite the move of the client to a different location, amid the project and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Business impact for the migration phase including the go live for all environments was “zero”.
Migration to Azure addressed the business requirements of the client's operations, while provided faster time to market, reliability and flexibility.
- Provisioning of infrastructure from 2 weeks to minutes via automation.
- Fast delivery & scalable Test/development application environments.
- Reliable and rapid change requests & remediation.
- Elasticity in databases.
- Effortless release management.
- Geo Redundancy