A significant municipality teamed up with Sopra Steria for an expert analysis of the best approach for migrating to the cloud, resulting in a successful transition from on-premises to Microsoft Azure Cloud.
Background: preparing for the cloud
The purpose of the analysis was to create a comprehensive understanding of how our customer could leverage cloud services to deliver their business applications optimally. Availability, capacity, cost, flexibility and security were all taken into account.
Customer Value: people meet technology with simplified server management
The analysis project gave our customer a complete overview of the entire IT infrastructure across their organisation of 15, 000 employees. This included all servers, the services offered, and how applications were used every day. Their cloud solution needed to include all services across the municipality, from innovation and business to sports and health. Safety alarms are just one example of a critical service that must be maintained during the migration phase from on-premises to the cloud, with little to no downtime.
Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) are familiar terms for technologists, indicating a secure path to the cloud. The use of technology was combined with an analysis of how the employees in the municipality work and close dialogue with service providers, from the home care department manager to employees in the park agency. The technology needed to be customer-friendly, with the technical aspects handled by the IT department. The solutions should simply work for end users in their daily work in a secure way.
The analysis was prepared for a thorough cleanup in close collaboration with all stakeholders, from customer teams to service providers to the IT department.
"We are ready for modernisation through a secure move to the cloud, providing freedom to scale with more solutions in the future," says a top manager of our customer. "All servers have been quality assured for such a process, and the number has been significantly reduced, enabling sustainable moderniastion."
Sopra Steria’s contribution: professionalised process and technological expertise
Sopra Steria was involved throughout the entire process, from analysis to the actual migration. We established good processes and working routines for the analysis. We developed templates for interviews and reports, recommended analysis tools suitable for mapping the server park and applications, and through reports, we recommended the necessary steps for moving to the cloud.
All of this was done in close collaboration with the customer and in direct contact with service managers within the organisation, ensuring everyone had the same understanding of the requirements. We also identified the modernisation benefits of the cloud, such as a better overview, simpler database administration, fewer servers, and improved scalability.
About the technology
Our customer’s new cloud solution is based on Sopra Steria's RightCloud 3.0 reference architecture in Azure. The solution is also set up with Terraform with underlying CI/CD pipelines. This has enabled the implementation of DevOps practices and tools for the customer team to manage and operate the solution in the future.
Sopra Steria provided expertise in migrating to Microsoft Azure Cloud, including:
- Azure Migrate (server mapping)
- Rehosting Windows servers on Azure (One of Gartner’s 5 Rs for cloud migration strategy. The server was moved to the Azure Data Center)
- Rehosting SQL on Azure
- Refactoring SQL on Azure
- Rehosting Linux servers on Azure
Sopra Steria's approach to cloud projects is based on the customer's needs and strategy and is named Sopra Steria RightCloud: the right cloud solution for the right customer. Our customer focus areas include sustainability, smart city initiatives, health, welfare, education, sports, culture, work environment, research, business, development, innovation, and user-oriented solutions, all guided by our analysis and description of a cloud solution. Contact us to discover how it could work for your organisation.