Data center migration to cloud

Challenge:

The global insurance company was challenged by constant hardware failures on their legacy infrastructure within their data center. They wanted to improve performance, reliability and scalability of IT services for the business, while reducing costs and overhead. The client initiated a strategic project to migrate their data center to a cloud-based data center that included the migration of production, test and development applications and associated infrastructure services hosted at the client’s primary data center facilities. The project had little margin for error as it involved the migration of large, interdependent business critical systems that tied directly to business revenue. In addition to the main business drivers, this project had to overcome the following additional challenges:

• Missing design and build documentation for production IT systems
• Undocumented service mappings of interdependent applications and services
• Condensed cutover windows for key business applications

Solution:

Mazars helped the client achieve its vision to migrate its IT operations to a new cloud-based Data Center by providing a team of Project Managers (PMs) who oversaw all aspects of the project from initiation to closure and Solution Architects that assisted the customer with the design, integration and migration strategy of the cloud data center, including the following:

• Managed the project to build, integrate, and test the solution and migrate the customer’s complex systems to the target cloud environment
• Helped architect and design the new cloud data center infrastructure
• Assisted client IT engineers in the evaluation and selection of migration, backup, application mapping and DR tools
• Provided extensive support to the client by reviewing and verifying application interdependency mappings and solution design specifications
• Coordinated and managed all aspects of the technical build and deployment
• Managed all vendor costs, deliverables, risks, and risk containment strategies
• Coordinated and managed the execution of testing and system migration to the new cloud environment

Results:

Mazars established a close strategic partnership with the global insurance company to successfully migrate over 500 servers and 140 applications to a newly created, secure cloud data center environment with minimal disruption to business operations. Additionally, the project produced the following customer results that further accentuates Mazars’ success:

• Improved stability, performance and security of business systems by migrating them to new infrastructure equipment
• Reduced IT costs by transitioning services to an operating expenditure model
• Transformed IT hosting costs to a more predictable model
• Increased IT customer service metrics by enabling IT resources to focus on serving the business by freeing them from data center responsibilities

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The information provided here is for general guidance only, and does not constitute the provision of tax advice, accounting services, investment advice, legal advice, or professional consulting of any kind. The information provided herein should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional tax, accounting, legal or other competent advisers.