Cloud Adoption

Cloud Adoption

Infrastructure & Data

The client:

A leading regional HR recruitment agency also provides HR and payroll outsourcing in-country services to their clients.

Case background:

Followed regional direction, the client considered not to maintain any hardware on-premises in Hong Kong. They need professional consulting service for a detailed plan including review of existing infrastructure, evaluate the possibilities and risks to migrate all existing systems and database services to cloud platform, provide analysis on different cloud platforms offering and advise the best approach for migration.

Benefits of migrate to cloud:

No more capex on IT infrastructure – pay-as-you-go monthly charge per actual consumption on cloud services

High availability – over 60 regions and 100+ datacenters across the world with guarantee at least 99.9% connectivity for single instance virtual machine using Premium SSD for Operation System Disks and Data Disks

Scalability and flexibility – able to move up the hardware instantly and flexible to extend the infrastructure with cloud services

Security and compliance – trusted cloud with over 100 compliance coverage in the industry and global compliance

Our service:

After assessment of existing infrastructure, review of existing resources to understand the availability, considerations of regional security & compliance requirement and client’s need and priority, cloud architecture design on Microsoft Azure is proposed. The cloud design proposed is not only based on existing hardware configurations but also the actual workload and usage characteristics.

To demonstrate the possibility of the move and provide client the understanding of potential efforts on migration, proof-of-concept (PoC) was conducted with the roadmap on digital transformation deployment by phases. Either plan for upgrade or fade out for those resources confirmed that unable to migrate to Azure.

Moving from CapEx to OpEx for IT spending, cost-saving is just the starting point. Ongoing cloud cost optimization is essential and crucial to maximize values of pay-as-you-go service model provided. In addition to second tier ongoing support service, assessment service and advise to client for review and enhancement to optimize cost-performance is provided from time to time.

Project challenges:

From initial discussion, resources review, architecture design, POC to phase 1 deployment was happened in a time frame of one month only. The project was very challenging not just the tight timeline for the digital transformation, but also the restrictions and critical requirements on the project.

Zero downtime – Most of the client’s services are in 7×24 non-stop operating support to their users and do not allow any downtime for migration. In addition, multi-tier system designed with isolation between POC and production environment to minimize the potential impact or interruption during migration. Some of the resources unable to migrate to cloud and need advice on the best approach to minimize the switching time.

Flexibility & Scalability – Consolidation and migration for more than 20 on-premises servers and services to cloud in phases, cloud resources is estimated and built based on systems’ previous workloads. High scalability of the cloud infrastructure is crucial since the services will also support users from multi regions after migration to cloud, infrastructure flexibility for services extension such as web application firewall and VPN connection is essential.

Security compliance & governance – The client is regional corporation provides SaaS to their end customer, compliant with internal policies and external regulations of the cloud environment is also major concern for the digital transformation. A trusted cloud environment with global compliance standards and certifications like ISO:27001, PIC DSS, SOC 1…etc is essential. Not only data and storage encryption is mandatory, but also professional services to define and enforce policies to ensure all the systems services and data flow are comply with the regulations.

On-going consultancy and support – Manage and operate a cost-effective, secure and high performance cloud environment is a challenge to the client always, considered they also provide SaaS to their end customer. Regular review on resources utilization not just help cost-saving but also optimize the resources used to fulfil the business need and budget. Cloud assessment services provides details findings and recommendations on 4 categories including performance, availability, security and cost, which enable the client to adopt best practices in cloud strategy.

• COMPLETED

  19 Apr 2016