Our client currently service all smartphones for a leading tech company in their 30+ retail stores stores across the UK; from the ‘behind the scenes’ tech in store to the warehousing solution, this is managed by for the tech company by our client.

The service was hosted in an IBM datacentre, with IBM outsourcing 3-4 areas of operations and another 2-3 third parties involved in ongoing management. The solution had suffered a number of Major Incidents related to availability and the tech company had cited a contract clause around service failure (and termination).

The Challenge

With the genuine threat of losing business, our client had to look to migrating out of IBM and simplifying their support landscape. Discussions with the tech company led them to agree a migration to Public Cloud was required – with AWS being Cloud of choice. Our client had previously attempted a service migration to AWS, opting to ‘learn on the job’ without AWS or partner engagement.

The migration was a failure and the experience negatively impacted a number of their services, including those of the tech company. With the migration still mandated and with more (outside and board-level) scrutiny than previous, Daemon were consulted as trusted partners.

What we did

An initial top-level discovery and Cloud-architecting workshop led to a presentation to the tech company’s Head of Service and Head of Security.

The solution utilised EC2 in load balanced autoscaling groups for middleware services. The Oracle databases were migrated to RDS, using custom-sized instances for cost control. Storage utilised EBS, S3 and EFS according to purpose. The whole solution’s network was ‘private’ connecting through a ‘transit’ VPC to our client’s closed ordering network via Direct Connect. Each solution tier was separated by private subnet and spread across AZ in the UK region. A ‘standby’ region (Ireland) with services powered down where also provisioned as a ‘belts and braces’ approach to the previous problematic availability.

Daemon designed, built, tested and executed the migration in a scheduled weekend. Daemon also provided 24/7 early life support. Our client coordinated security, their datacentre networks and managed application/database testing. Personnel (newly hired into a CloudOps team) were invited to learn and be involved in every step of the process, as the support of the service would be taken in-house post ELS.

Outcome

Daemon led the presentations and were seen as the trusted partner which led to the sign-off to migrate. Daemon also brought the AWS Account Manager into all of these interactions.

This project was the ‘Day 0’ of establishing a new Cloud footprint and capability. Our client intended to go ‘all in’ during 2019 migrating away from IBM DCs completely.

Result

This project (underpinning a £30M revenue stream) was delivered, from initial workshop to live solution in a 10 week period. EMEA Head of Security for the leading tech company commented that it would be a dream come true if all of their partners were adopting such well architected solutions and working with experts like Daemon.