A Fast Start
Although our cloud transformation journey is still in
process and will take a while to complete, it did start
quickly. In January 2017, we began our data center
consolidation analysis. By March, we had decided to
move 30 percent of our workloads to the cloud. By
May, we opted for a complete shift, moving all corpo-
rate enterprise workloads to the cloud, keeping a
reduced data center footprint for mission-critical
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA)
operations. We chose a service provider in July, and
by early 2018 we were starting to migrate apps.
The first decision we made was to go with IaaS rather
than PaaS. There are advantages to doing a full-on
rewrite of your applications using PaaS — you get all
kinds of flexibility and can innovate to fully optimize
each app. But this is a huge commitment right out of
the gate, and we felt we would be better off with an
IaaS approach, lifting and shifting each of our apps to
the cloud over the course of 2 years.
The lift-and-shift approach was easier to sell to busi-
ness users. They would get the benefits right out of
the box — all the agility, speed and reliability associ-
ated with cloud infrastructure platforms. Users
would be able to leverage data links immediately
without having to clean up the data. Plus, IaaS buys us
time to train and transform our organization. The
idea is to get off the bare metal as fast as possible,
migrate the legacy apps to IaaS, then rewrite them in
the future, if required.
We considered a number of factors in our choice of
AWS as our cloud provider. We looked at the cost,
capabilities, maturity of the platform and toolset
offered, and AWS came out on top in each category.
You have to create
urgency within your
organization, because
you need to have
everybody on board.
8 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2018
As part of our process, we gave each potential vendor
a set of applications and asked them to demonstrate
how they would move the apps from our on-premises
environment to their particular platform.
Help With Migration
Next, we needed a partner to help us move through
the migration stage of our cloud journey. Based on
recommendations from AWS, we engaged Cloud
Technology Partners (CTP), a Hewlett-Packard Enter-
prise company. We were impressed with the method-
ology, tools and resources CTP brought to the proj-
ect. CTP helped us classify our apps into multiple
categories based on each app’s readiness to be hosted
in a cloud environment, and then created a schedule
to migrate the apps onto the AWS platform.
By mid-2018, we had migrated about 20 percent of
our apps to the cloud environment. Overall, the
migration has run smoothly. Migration approaches
under an IaaS model have resulted to date in minimal
disruption and outage time for business operations.
Perhaps the biggest challenge has been gathering the
documentation for hundreds of applications, to make
sure we weren’t missing anything. Then there is the
issue of getting all the right teams together to test
and support an application once it has moved over.
Keeping the pipeline full with apps by adhering to
schedules has been critical to the performance of the
project.
Team Re-invention
Training the staff has been one of our top priorities –
and one of our greatest successes. We are essentially
reinventing ourselves to work with the cloud. We
wanted our core staff – core employees who are
shareholders in the company – to embrace technol-
ogy change, so we put together programs to bring
them on board.
Offering a blend of traditional in-class and self-ser-
vice training, we set a target of having 5 percent of
the staff achieving basic AWS certification by the end
of 2018. Midway through the year, we are at 7 percent.
Employees are embracing the different programs –