Situation
As a consulting company active in Digital Strategy and Technical Consultancy, we have always had growing needs for our internal IT infrastructure.
Having to deal with a diverse landscape of hosting solutions and technologies became increasingly difficult and costly for our team. This is when we realized the urgent need to consolidate our IT infrastructure into one single solution.
With this goal in mind we decided to look for a cost-efficient and agile solution to reliably host the IT solutions required for our day-to-day business operations, and to roll this out within a period of two months.
Approach
1. Inventory of work processes and supporting IT solutions
By interviewing multiple stakeholders in the company, we identified a)
the key IT solutions supporting our business, b)
redundancy & overlap in functional coverage and c) our technical requirements. Recommendations were made to eliminate the less competitive redundant
systems and to eliminate functional overlap. The inventory was then used as
the basis to define the requirements for the consolidated hosting solution.
Considerations such as availability, performance, security where taken into
account.
2. Selection of a hosting solution
Based on the selection criteria and using latest technology research, we
explored different options for hosting. Going to the cloud was a no-brainer,
however selecting the right cloud service and provider remained a challenge.
Our team deep dived in several solutions, from bare-metal to Platform as a
Service (PaaS), public and private cloud, and in various geographies.
Ultimately the choice was made to move forward with Swisscom Dynamic
Computing Service (DCS), for efficiency, reliability, performance and
geographical / legal reasons. Still, to be cost effective this solution
required a careful dimensioning and architecting of the data center to
maximize benefit and minimize cost.
3. Migration of IT solutions and data
We dimensioned the data center and virtual machines according to Cloud best
practices and reflecting the application requirements (availability,
performance and security). We automated the setup of the data center and
of each IT solution, making it future proof and easy to upgrade or migrate.
As a final step, we migrated all data and put the necessary monitoring tools
in place.
In only two months we managed to migrate to a full cloud-based, agile infrastructure that requires minimal effort to mantain, and can be easily adjusted to reflect our growth. We are proud of the outcome of the project and look forward to supporting our clients in this very important IT transformation topic.
