Case Study

Cloud Migration Planning

An organisation had a large on-prem monolithic system that was custom built over 30 years to interact with an industry regulated platform. The monolithic system was also tightly coupled with a heavily customised CRM, both of which underpinned ~70% billable revenues. The system had performance issues and outages become more frequent, especially during billing runs and reporting days.

Opportunity

There was an opportunity to assess options for breaking down the monolithic system by extracting blocks of functionality, buying a COTs product, or starting from scratch and rebuilding a whole new platform within the Cloud. The opportunity included assessing a new solution for business operations, all of which were documented within a strategic plan and roadmap to guide decision making and transformation planning.

Hypotheses

Is it possible to breakdown a complex monolithic system and decouple a CRM, without impacting business operations and ongoing business project changes?
Is it possible to simplify the IT landscape and enable a greater rate of business change, by consolidating functionality & modernising the architectures?
Is it possible to reduce IT operational costs by remediating technical debt and retiring the monolithic system and CRM?

The solution

Understand the current state by running a series of discovery sessions that included a deep technical dive into the databases and application code of the monolithic system and the CRM solution. Including writing a custom GraphQL app to help trawl through execution queries and internal database dependencies. This also included creating the architectures for the current state on-prem and target state in the Cloud, and overlaying compliance and security requirements to assess gaps and vulnerabilities.

Major Pain Points

Monolithic system has a high risk of failure and performance was continuing to degrade.
Heavy reliance on a few individuals that know the system, which underpins almost 70% of billable revenues.
Manual processes causing high costs for compliance and no ability to overlay data controls.
No access to near real-time data for stream-based analytics and decision making.
CRM systems were tightly coupled with the monolithic system.
Excel workbooks and reporting was driven from data derived from the monolith, but the data was not fully trusted.

Outcome

A strategic plan and roadmap were created to guide decision making and Cloud migration planning, including an Excel workbook for detailed sprint planning and cost modelling. The discovery work showed it was not feasible to break apart the monolithic system and the approach was to combine the use of Cloud COTS + service builds + CRM to replace all functionality. Included was a phased approach to Cloud migration and a squad delivery model to support ongoing business project changes and the Cloud migration.

The future state designs supported 61 features across 24 new services and version upgrades across 35 existing service. The designs also include 95 business entities that were part of a data management and migration plan. The final inclusion was treatment plans for compliance and security requirements.

Technological Change Consultancy

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Case Study

Cloud Migration Planning

Opportunity