From the Data Center to the Cloud

CLOUD MIGRATION JOURNEY

This regional bank turned to Arraya to migrate from their data center to the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Challenge

This client is a regional bank that offers a full suite of retail and commercial financial products and services. As a financial institution, they have strict security and compliance regulations that they must adhere to. They had on-premises infrastructure servers, storage, and VMware vSphere. Their hardware was aging, and they were acquiring some technical debt. They had reached a point at which they needed to either refresh their data center or migrate to the cloud.

For several reasons, they wanted to get out of their data center:

  • Their servers and storage would require a total hardware refresh if they were to continue to run on-prem, which would be a significant upfront cost.
  • Their existing disaster recovery environment was not as robust as it needed to be.
  • In addition to needing a hardware refresh, their version of vSphere was approaching end of support and would require software upgrades and a support and subscription renewal for their VMware licensing.

While this existing Arraya customer considered multiple bids for this business, Arraya won the job. We took the time to conduct a full analysis of their existing environment, develop an architecture design, migration plan, and deployment services, and offered additional managed and advisory services as needed.

Solution

As this customer was most comfortable with Microsoft cloud solutions, our goal was to help them become Azure native. Their existing familiarity with managing VMware vSphere made Azure VMware Solution a great stepping stone towards achieving that goal.

To do so, the migration process was broken down into a three-phased approach:

Phase I – Assess Legacy State: We started with an Azure Migrate assessment to get a detailed inventory of workloads in their existing data centers. We then developed a migration plan that would use VMware HCX to stretch networks and allow for a non-disruptive migration.

Phase II – Azure VMware Solution (AVS) Migration: Their data centers were migrated to AVS, which allowed them to run their workloads in Azure, but continue to maintain their workloads with the VMware toolsets they were most familiar with. Replication to a second region allowed AVS workloads to be failed over in the event of an outage in their primary Azure region.

Phase III – AVS to Azure Native Migration: With all workloads migrated from on-premises to AVS, Arraya provided services to assist with the migration of workloads to native Azure resources such as virtual machines and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

This cloud migration journey is part of a three-year plan. As the client’s CSP, we created a three-year licensing reservation for them, which:

  • Eliminated the need to renew their on-premises VMware licensing support contract
  • Significantly reduced their licensing and cloud consumption expenses
  • Offered better SLAs for Microsoft support
  • Covered all direct communication with Microsoft experts

Results

This client is currently in the “Phase III” stage of their cloud migration journey. At the end of this three-year journey to become cloud-native, this client can expect:

  • A lower overall cost of ownership without the need for maintenance, administration, and support
  • Better flexibility and integration with other Azure solutions
  • The time necessary to develop the skillsets they need to manage an Azure-native environment
  • The option to repurpose their data center real estate for something else

For this client, we supported them in setting up their entire cloud migration. They now have the tools they need to complete the rest of the migration on their own. As a cloud-native organization, they’ll enjoy better flexibility, scalability, and increased security overall well into the future.

Migrating to the cloud is a lot easier than you think. Contact us to begin planning your migration today.