Datacenter Transformation for an Education ISV in USA

About Company

One of the leading SaaS solutions that automate financial aid management solutions for educational institutes since last 12 years and has around 25% of top online programs in the USA. They offer institutions an unprecedented ability to automate the financial aid process to increase efficiency, mitigate compliance risks, expand enrolment, improve the student experience and satisfaction.

Project Summary

Being a fast-growing organization, they wanted to move their vast on-premise environment of more than 80+ servers to Microsoft Azure along with their broad range of customers with minimal downtime. They selected us because they wanted an experienced partner to guide them in Azure best practices and help them migrate seamlessly. We migrated all their servers from on-premise to Azure in just 600+ hours with a downtime of about 8 hours only.

Challenge

Being a global organisation with multiple teams, business groups and their scattered customers, it was difficult coordinating with everyone and understanding their and their customers’ requirements. Also, keeping the migration process seamless with minimum downtime for users and IT teams, while making sure that each phase completes within the set timeline to avoid impact to ongoing projects

Solution

We did an in-depth analysis of their complete on-premise infrastructure, networking, dependencies between system and built an architecture that would resolve all access, security, isolation and performance challenges. We utilized the Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for migrating a mix of VMware, Hyper-V and Physical VMs both Windows & Linux from their on-premise datacenter.

A comprehensive testing was done on every VM in Azure & coordinated with teams across the company, before their final migration and all known issues were resolved for a seamless migration experience.

Legacy systems were upgraded to latest Windows Server & SQL versions along with troubleshooting all compatibility issues.