case studies

A national, non-bank, mortgage servicing company was faced with the challenge of vacating their hosted data center within nine months, due to the closure of that data center by the provider.

The traditional data center infrastructure lacked sustainability, scalability, agility, and cost-efficiency, impacting the company’s ability to respond quickly to market changes and dynamics. To address these issues, the company decided to migrate its data center operations to a cloud-based solution.

The primary objectives of the migration were as follows:

Rapidity: Exit the data center within nine months to avoid business disruption.

Scalability: Scale resources up or down, based on demand fluctuations.

Agility: Implement faster deployment of applications and services.

Cost efficiency: Shift to an operational expenditure model and reduce hardware and maintenance costs by moving to the cloud.

The company chose a multi-phased approach for migrating its data center to the cloud.

Phase 1: Assessment and Planning

The company conducted a thorough assessment of its existing infrastructure, applications, and data to identify dependencies, potential challenges, and to prioritize the migration sequences.

Phase 2: Selection of Cloud Provider

After careful evaluation, the company opted for a hybrid cloud solution using Microsoft Azure cloud.

Phase 3: Workload Migration

Workload migration was a critical step. The company used a combination of methods, including virtual machine (VM) replication and database migration tools, to transfer data seamlessly while minimizing downtime.

Phase 4: Testing and Validation

A thorough testing and validation process was conducted to ensure the migrated applications and data performed as expected within the cloud environment.

Phase 5: Go Live and Optimize

Once testing was successful, the company switched over to the cloud environment. Post-migration, ongoing optimization efforts were put in place to right-size resources and ensure cost effectiveness.

The migration of the company data center to the cloud yielded significant benefits:

Scalability: The company now effortlessly scales resources up or down, accommodating traffic spikes during peak and non-peak periods.

Agility: Application deployment was time reduced from weeks to hours, enabling faster delivery time.

Cost efficiency: The pay-as-you-go model allowed for better cost control and resource utilization.

Accessibility: Employees gained secure access to data and applications from anywhere, enhancing collaboration and remote work capabilities.

The successful migration of the company data center to the cloud revolutionized its business operations. By embracing scalability, agility, and cost efficiency, the company positioned itself for continued growth within a competitive market landscape. This case demonstrates the strategic advantages of a well-executed migration from a traditional data center infrastructure to the cloud.

A large mortgage company had been running their operations with a traditional on-premises data center infrastructure for many years. They had been experiencing challenges to create a budget and execution plan for their IT infrastructure to match the significant market volatility based on rising and falling interest rates. Historically, peak volumes were anticipated to be for a short duration and then infrastructure would need to be scaled back. In addition, this company wanted modern auto-scaling architectures that could be provisioned in a scripted fashion with an unknown level of capacity that would be needed for an unknown duration of time.

To address these issues, Essentials played a key role to advise the client to migrate all applications and infrastructure to a public cloud provider. All new applications would take a cloud first approach and existing applications would be lifted and shifted to the cloud as quickly as resources allowed. After the workloads were migrated, Essentials would evaluate the environment for modernization and optimization approaches using cloud native best practices. AWS was selected as the primary Infrastructure as a Service Cloud provider and Microsoft Azure was selected as a secondary cloud provider for Platform as a Service solutions in the Office 365 space. When possible, AWS cloud native architectures would be selected and, in some cases, existing vendor solutions were implemented through the AWS Marketplace. AWS had the broadest and most unbiased support for the client’s specific application and infrastructure needs across many different vendor solutions including Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, and many others.

This large mortgage company has utilized Essentials resources to successfully migrate all applications to AWS. The client now enjoys not having to guess at capacity requirements but being able to adjust infrastructure to meet growth or reduction requirements and pay for those solutions on a month-to-month basis. Overall, their reliability and resilience has improved by implementing the AWS multiple availability zone and multiple region strategy selectively to meet cost and resilience requirements. After the initial lift and shift migration, by continuing to modernize and optimize auto-scaling infrastructure, this company has been able to reduce infrastructure costs over a 12-month time frame by 60% without any long-term infrastructure spend commitments.