Concurrency Assists Professional Services Firm with Critical Business Application Migration to Azure

Background

Recently a client of ours requested assistance with a project to migrate a critical business application from on-premises infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. One of the key business drivers for the migration was seasonal demand: our client needed to be able to quickly and effectively scale up computing services to meet users’ demand during heavy use months.

Solution

Initially, this project looked like a “lift and shift” to Azure—migrating the application as-is. However, in working with our client’s internal IT team, we learned the team had already moved toward some automated configuration processes. We suggested to continue down this path. So, as part of the project, we assisted with re-platforming the critical business application from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012 R2. The firm’s internal IT team handled programming aspects of the rebuild, and we helped the team push the application to the new operating system. This allowed our client to take advantage of Server Name Indications, thereby consolidating the public-facing resources and, ultimately, fewer IP addresses for the company’s several websites. This upgrade enabled use of Azure load balancers—and therefore no wasted resources.

Then the project turned to spinning up the application on Azure, including load balancing, virtual networks, subnets, storage accounts, virtual machines, data drives, and more. As part of this process, we helped our client’s IT team lay the groundwork for hybrid connectivity including VPN from on-premises to Azure. At the end of the project, the organization was well prepared to both deploy and efficiently consume resources as needed, in response to business needs.

This project stands out for its swift execution. Our client’s internal IT team was extremely adept at working with the application in question. That internal expertise combined with our Azure experience enabled a very smooth process and fast timeline.