Migrating a Large Telecom Company to AWS
Customer profile
Location: Dallas, TX
Industry: Telecommunications
Project Duration: 18 months
The Challenge – Manual Cloud Discovery and Migration Processes
A major telecommunications provider based in Dallas, Texas got a mandate from its executive team – move the company’s applications to the cloud. It turned out that was easier said than done. 18 months after starting to work toward this goal, the project was not progressing fast enough. Old versions of underlying software tools kept popping up in the software stack, and some applications had been around so long that there was no understanding on the team of the application’s composition and dependencies — much less the required documentation.
The telecom provider’s current structure was focused on manual build and deploy processes, which was hampering the speed of their attempted jump to the cloud. As the company still wanted to move their applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) while supporting security key refresh policies, it was clear they needed to bring in experts to help get it done.
The two application types that would be focused on included: mainframe-based, mission-critical legacy applications (which involved a full-stack upgrade for Microsoft Windows, IIS Server, JDK, WebSphere, DB2 Client, plus SSO and DNS configuration changes); and a high-volume legacy application suite that was using over 80 servers for 120 applications, requiring a Solaris to CentOS conversion and JDK and WebLogic upgrades, and had over ten data sources, ten domains, and numerous third-party libraries. To top it all off, mandatory security processes would need to be applied to the applications before they could be put into production.
Along the way, Matilda discovered expired (and soon to expire) software that was costing thousands of dollars a year to license, and provided the company with an optimized, multi-year plan to phase these applications out and save those costs.
The Solution – Automated Application Discovery and Cloud Migration
With Matilda Discover, the telecommunications provider received visibility into their application environment with automated application discovery, including the compute, storage, network, and service requirements for the applications. The company was then able to spend time verifying that the applications would work with the required upgrades, as they did by migrating the applications to a non-production environment and performing extensive testing.
After the quality validations were completed, phase two began: moving the applications to production. Matilda Migrate automated a number of important aspects of the move: the infrastructure-as-code required to fit the application into the customer’s CI/CD process, the necessary scripts to install all of the supporting software for the applications, and the standardized and reusable cloud configuration templates to ensure adherence with configuration policies.
The Results
Matilda recognized the telecommunications provider’s unknowns in their application portfolio quickly and efficiently to accelerate their automated cloud migration, discovering, assessing, and consolidating cloud-ready workloads for the company’s IT department’s operational efficiency. The company’s existing environment was discovered, including compute, storage, network, services, and applications.
Matilda successfully migrated the company’s applications to AWS, configuring the virtual infrastructure and setting them up to easily manage future releases and security requirements with release automation.
Additionally, the telecom company benefited from the following thanks to Matilda Discover and Matilda Migrate:
- Insight into the operational cost of running their previous data centers and a detailed breakdown of cost-savings
- New opportunities to right-size AWS instances
- Application-Infrastructure mapping that displayed critical dependencies in the environment
- A comprehensive set of reports covering inventory, cloud disposition, service discovery, host discovery, system service information, host counts, and availability percentages.
Learn more about Matilda Discover, and Matilda Migrate.