How a Global Manufacturer Accelerated their Cloud Adoption to Drive Innovation and Agility
Summary:
Learn how TransitionManager software allowed a global luxury vehicle manufacturer to see their entire environment with current, accurate and actionable data. This platform enabled business, app, infrastructure and security stakeholders to make better, faster and more informed decisions which accelerated their workload migrations.
The Challenge:
In order to continue to thrive in today’s innovative and fast-paced automotive market, this global luxury vehicle manufacturer needed a flexible, scalable cloud adoption strategy. Meeting their demands for innovation, capacity for growth, and reduced costs required a comprehensive, efficient, and collaborative cloud adoption strategy.
The manufacturer’s U.S. leadership team established the key objectives for this major initiative, with plans to build a strategy and a process that would set the standard for the global organization:
- Accelerate Cloud Adoption – Requires applications assessed and prioritized to create an actionable and optimized plan to increase cloud adoption
- Accommodate Data Center Capacity Requirements – Increased IT demand has led to increased data center capacity needs and client is nearing total capacity
- Drive Innovation – The automobile industry continues to demand innovation and change. The organization needs flexible scalable platforms to increase innovation and change
- Minimize Impact– Tribal knowledge must be leveraged by internal and vendor SMEs for an accurate and actionable view of the environment. Client must minimize the impact on these resources in this process
- Business Case – The organization requires accurate data and vision into the overall cloud migration effort to support a compelling business case for this project
The Solution
With TDS and its TransitionManager software, the manufacturer found a solution which allowed them to see their entire environment with current, accurate and actionable data. This platform enabled business, app, infrastructure and security stakeholders to make better, faster and more informed decisions which will accelerate their workload migrations.
For the manufacturer’s IT team, this provided a streamlined, data-driven and integrated approach to their application discovery, application rationalization, a roadmap, and a migration execution platform to orchestrate both the human and the automated elements.
Discovery and Validation
To begin, the customer’s IT organization imported all existing data from multiple sources, including their enterprise architecture platform, CMDB, vCenter exports, and performance data into TransitionManager. It was then automatically mapped and normalized to create an initial filter to sort out obviously unsuitable migration candidates. This allowed the team to focus on cloud-friendly applications that would deliver immediate value.
The resulting consolidated view visually represented not only all applications but the application hierarchy and ever-important interdependency analysis. The rich visualization tools in TransitionManager are designed to show every known data point, application, server, etc. as well as – and this is vital – how they are interdependent.
For the IT team, this provided much needed visibility into the inner workings and dependencies of all the applications. Any data gaps and untrusted data were quickly identified in preparation for meetings with the application owners.
Application rationalization paves the way for efficient planning
With more accurate and actionable information now captured, the team performed an initial assessment of readiness for cloud migration for the full application portfolio. The criteria to evaluate each application or bundle included:
Brief SME interviews were then conducted with application experts to validate the accuracy of the application data and their dependencies and align them with business requirements and priorities.
It was critical to import details from systems and experts into TransitionManager prior to these interviews – then use the focused sessions with the application owners to validate that information. It was especially valuable to follow this step of the TDS methodology because the manufacturer’s experts were in various locations across the US and didn’t have an efficient way to collect “tribal” knowledge. Interviews allowed the team to identify important interfaces and dependencies. The SMEs appreciated the opportunity to contribute critical information and confirm decisions which would impact their application.
This resulted in a high degree of trust in the process and confidence in the information and the decisions – providing a sound basis for future project planning and decisions on future migrations.
Building the Roadmap
The overall strategy provided guiding principles for the application rationalization process:
- Consider cloud first for all new applications and applications undergoing a major redesign
- Buy before build and consider SaaS solutions whenever possible
- Use lift and shift as is to cloud, a last resort because it often fails to produce cost savings, and in fact, may require future redesign
This process quickly identified the first waves of simpler, cloud-ready applications, while more complex workloads requiring re-platforming or re-factoring were set aside for later. This factory approach accelerated the number of applications to migrated right away and enabled the team to focus on the more comprehensive migration of complex / mixed environments which risked slowing down or even stalling the pace of migrations.
The actual migration of the workload further demonstrated the power and value of TransitionManager. The information gathered and stored in TransitionManager created “recipes,” groups of rules for sequencing and creating both automated and human tasks to perform during each event.
Recipes ensure that all the traits, such as asset type, class and dependencies are stored for intelligent workstream management and can be repeated in any future tasks, ensuring efficiency and consistency.
These recipes also orchestrated each migration event by integrating the cloud transport capabilities of CloudEndure Migration, making the workload migrations move seamlessly, quickly, at the lowest cost and lowest risk.
The Results
Faster analysis and decision making
With an initial application roadmap now established in an actionable platform, all teams now work in real time and are no longer slowed down by the information bottlenecks and gaps experienced with old project management systems and outdated working practices.
The TransitionManager ingestion and normalization capabilities automated much of the time-consuming work of gathering basic information on potential targets in the initial analysis phase and keeps all information – and stakeholders – in synch on any changes. Even more important, this established an efficient migration factory built on a solid methodology and a platform for decision making.
It provides the IT organization with powerful flexibility to change their plans whenever they are hit with new information, while enhancing their ability to quickly test “what if” scenarios, identify any roadblocks, and test the impact of their decisions.
More transparency
The central dashboard allows team members and business leads to easily monitor all phases of the project. The team uses this to track progress across all tasks, team members and goals and promote transparency across the increasing number of projects and migrations.
Integration with existing automation tools to accelerate
The actual movement of applications to the cloud are accelerated and automated via API calls to AWS CloudEndure Migration. TransitionManager utilized data from the analysis and planning phase to direct their movement.
