How a Social Enterprise Recognized Significant Savings through Azure Migration

Background and Challenge Story

Our client, a Canadian social enterprise, needed a cloud migration plan, after experiencing an unexpected disaster at their on-premises data center. This emphasized their need to have backup and redundancy for their IT systems and effective business continuity components such as disaster recovery, failover, and replication. They also wanted to take advantage of cloud resources and advanced analytics and chose the Azure cloud as it would provide high security, scalability, and built-in continuity planning.

The Solution: Data Center Migration to the Azure Cloud

Zelusit worked with Microsoft and the client for 2 days to understand their needs and implement the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. Zelusit executed discovery and design for the cloud migration and backups that would enable the client for sustainability, scalability, support, and modernization of the Azure platform. Within 5 days Zelusit put together a proposal that would save the client over $0.5M in hardware and maintenance costs. Zelusit reacted in a timely and effective manner getting senior resources onboarded within 2 days.

Zelusit had the right resources and services to fit the client’s needs. Within 6 months, Zelusit completed the design of their network architecture, replication, and disaster recovery in compliance with the Government of Canada’s protected B, medium integrity, and medium availability (PBMM) for classified data. Zelusit lifted and shifted all legacy servers from the on-premises data center to Azure including 124 applications and 21 databases. Zelusit helped with project management and wave migration sprint planning and execution and trained the entire client’s technical team with the new Azure platform, increasing their competency and comfort. We also completed the project with minimal delays and with the production migration completed ahead of time.

Zelusit can replicate this process for other customers efficiently, including any Government of Canada department or closely affiliated Crown corporation, and can execute landing zones, data center migrations, or database + application migrations successfully. We have built a custom framework for network and security topology, data residency, wave migration accelerators, and PBMM + Authority to Operate (ATO) compliance standards pre-defined for the Government of Canada.

Data Center Migration Impact

• High security, scalability, and built-in continuity planning
• Future-proof architecture with disaster recovery
• Time to focus on innovation instead of on-premises system maintenance
• Organizational training on Azure
• Can now adopt analytics on the Azure EDW platform

After the data center migration to the Azure cloud, our client significantly reduced their investment in on-premises network and server maintenance (CapEx investments). Zelusit also increased the client’s ability to make independent infrastructure decisions on their legacy on-premises data center. Moving to Azure also secures our client from future disaster recovery requirements and enables them to future-proof their architecture and modernize their applications. Their staff can now focus on innovation and optimization, such as modernizing their Azure cloud platform, instead of maintaining their legacy platforms. The client is also now enabled to adopt Analytics on the Azure enterprise data warehouse platform.