About the Client
CloudPay is a global provider of unified employee pay services. Working with more than 1,500 companies to connect processes such as payroll, payments and on-demand pay, it enhances operations to ensure positive employee experiences.
In readiness for mass migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company engaged us to conduct an AWS Cloud Migration Assessment. Our consultant-led workshops and discovery sessions generated technical insights to set CloudPay up for a fast, secure migration.
Challenge: Finding the Best Route to the Cloud
Following high levels of growth and international success, CloudPay initiated a migration of its IT estate from datacentres to AWS. Once some exploratory pilot migrations were complete, the company was keen to take stock and ensure cloud benefits such as scalability, agility and cost-effectiveness were being leveraged properly. As an employee pay services provider, ensuring optimum security and compliance was also a top priority.
The next phase of large-scale migration needed to be fast, secure and effective. CloudPay initially expected to adopt a lift and shift approach for the bulk of the estate to maximise ease and speed. However, this was coupled with the need to lay strong foundations for cloud best practice. We were engaged to assess the different options, build a business case and make recommendations as part of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) protocol.
“[The team] ran well-constructed sessions to lead us through the AWS MAP process. They provided good documentation and frequently asked for feedback to ensure they were delivering a high level of service.”
Raffaele Vitale
Technical Project Manager, CloudPay
Solution: A Detailed Assessment for Migration Success
The Assess phase of MAP takes a detailed look at the business itself as well as processes, people, platforms, operations and security. It highlights gaps that might hinder cloud performance, identifies any additional capabilities that may be required and underpins a robust total cost of ownership (TCO) model.
Our goal was to illustrate how lift and shift migrations for various parts of the estate would stack up against engineering-led migrations involving re-platforming or refactoring.
To gather the necessary information, we conducted a series of workshops and targeted discovery sessions focused on the infrastructure, operations and workloads. This included dedicated sessions for databases destined for AWS, so we could provide options based on their size and functionality. We also conducted a Well-Architected Review and used AWS Migration Hub to collate all resources and data in a single location for individual applications.
Due to the international nature of CloudPay’s team, plus Covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, these sessions were held remotely using a virtual whiteboard to facilitate collaboration with overseas colleagues.
As well as producing a business case and a proposal for the Mobilise phase of MAP, we created pilot migration blueprints for five applications to enable quicker progress.
Outcome: Technical Insights Mean Better Decisions
The outputs of our Assess phase activity clearly demonstrate the likely outcomes of different approaches to cloud migration. CloudPay’s decision makers now have a detailed overview of the costs and wider implications attached to various migration options so they can make more informed choices about the best way forward.
Our proposal is engineering-ready, so the transition to MAP’s Mobilise phase will be quick and seamless. What’s more, our five application migration blueprints provide repeatable patterns for mass migration, rather than focusing solely on complex tasks. This will enable CloudPay to take a pragmatic approach to largescale migration, building confidence and capabilities as the migration progresses, as well as reducing risk.
“Initially we weren’t sure about using an external consultancy to support our migration to AWS, but we’ve learnt so much from our work together. [The team has] been transparent, they explain things well and their technical knowledge is superb.”
Andy Keil
Global Head of Infrastructure, CloudPay
This case study is based on work completed by DevOpsGroup before the team joined forces with Sourced Group, an Amdocs company.
