Greek Yellow Pages migrates to Microsoft Azure

A yet another successful project on Data Migration to Microsoft Azure that showcased how digital transformation will lead the way in the times to come with cloud being its spearhead.

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greek yellow pages case
Τhe Customer

Greek Yellow Pages is the oldest Greek professional directory provider, which has been operating in the market
since 1971, when the first printed professional catalogue was published; today serves its clients through online operations. 

Need

According to the Development Strategy of Greek Yellow Pages, a new ІТ infrastructure had to be put in place with
the aim to comply with the principles of scalability, rapid changes, transparency and manageability, adequate cost of
ownership, business continuity, and cybersecurity.

  • Gradual migration of the existing on-premises infrastructure (servers, virtual machines, services) to Microsoft Azure cloud utilizing the ‘Lift & Shift’ and Refactor approach.
  • Increase of the utilization of Microsoft Azure cloud services across Greek Yellow Pages.
  • Reduction of the ІТ infrastructure’s TCO by lowering CAPEX and OPEX expenditures on ІТ infrastructure support in a long-term perspective.
  • Ensure smooth migration of all servers and services of the company without halting production or business processes.
Solution

Uni Systems followed its proved Azure Migration methodology built on the basis of Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework and well-architected framework for Azure:

  • Assessment 
  • Migration
  • Management  

The cloud migration project comprised of several stages that were carried out according to a detailed plan:
 

IaaS & PaaS architecture design & development
Uni Systems and Greek Yellow Pages team conducted a series of architectural sessions, resulting in a detailed strategy of data center migration. The teams designed and agreed upon Cloud Architecture (IaaS and PaaS), technical solution stack and specifications, they scheduled the migration plan, and designed a testing approach.
 

Stabilization of the solutions within the IaaS infrastructure
During this stage, the project team configured Microsoft Azure infrastructure, including Identity Management, Availability, and Disaster Recovery, Backup and Monitoring Systems, Migration mechanisms, while created custom scripts to automate the Migration. After configuring all required settings, the project team conducted a test migration of selected servers and tested them according to the previously designed quality assurance approach.

Migration execution
Due to the complexity of the project, the Project Team decided to split the entire migration process into stages. Each stage included the Migration of a group of servers, post-migration testing, setup, backup, and monitoring.
 

Post Migration Testing of migrated services
The Project Team conducted post-migration testing of services, both functional and performance testing, to confirm that the solutions deployed in Microsoft Azure operated correctly and met the functional requirements according to designed architecture.

Products

Microsoft Azure

SQL Server

Benefits

Migration to Microsoft Azure significantly improved reliability, security, and productivity of Greek Yellow Pages systems, as well as reduced TCO of the IT infrastructure.

  • Azure will serve as a digital cloud platform for the development and implementation of innovative IT services as per Greek Yellow Pages’ digital transformation strategy.
  • Reduced operational support costs. Greek Yellow Pages is now more flexible in terms of building virtual servers, being able to scale, and add capacity to the running instances.
  • Azure also helped to cut down the costs of upgrading obsolete equipment.
  • Azure ensures Greek Yellow Pages’ Data Security and Privacy in terms of risks related to data losses or corruption thanks to integrated replication/ backup/ clustering solutions and 99.95% availability of IT services with minimized unplanned downtimes.
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