RAMP: 30 Clients in 15 Months
All of Sierra-Cedar’s hosted clients have now successfully migrated to AWS. It is with immense pride that I share the outstanding achievements of our recent Rapid AWS Migration Project (RAMP) and provide an overview of why we chose to embark on this bold initiative and laid the foundation for a new phase of our business.
After substantial preparatory work with our clients, RAMP got underway in Q1 of 2023 with a clear and ambitious goal – by the end of May 2024, migrate all data center-hosted clients to cloud infrastructure powered by AWS. While a small number of clients either chose to exit our service or migrate to OCI, most of our clients opted to stay with us and migrate to AWS.
Triggers for Our Move
Our data center provider announced its second bankruptcy in three years, a situation that was quite serious this time. Further, the facility we were in was emptying out, raising concerns about the stability of both the provider and the facility. Our hosted clients in the higher education, state and local government, healthcare, and commercial areas entrusted us with their mission-critical Oracle enterprise applications. Given the changing data center market, we did not think it prudent to continue with our existing hosting structure under such significant risks.
Although immediate concerns regarding the data center dissipated, the need for long-term stability, sustainability, and scalability for our clients remained. When we began to talk with our clients about their options, we learned more and more about their desire to move to the cloud and spent more time looking at the cloud options we could offer them.
Our interest in moving to the public cloud was timely. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 85% of enterprises will shut down their traditional data centers. This does not signify the end of data centers but rather a period of rapid evolution. As decision-makers face budget pressures, options like infrastructure-as-a-service are becoming increasingly appealing. Cloud infrastructure has transitioned from a mere glimmer of potential a few years back to a fully embraced solution.
The Initial Days and Planning
After considerable technical and business-side planning, our RAMP project officially commenced in Q1 2023. All members of our hosting support resource pool across India and the US were enabled in waves on AWS and Sierra-Cedar’s FlexOps automation framework to support the RAMP push. The team embraced the challenges of transitioning to a vastly different landscape to support our clients, with some teammates traveling across the ocean to bolster ranks at critical times. We created a cluster-team approach that consisted of holistic skills within each cluster to make the migration effective.
After 15 months of continuous work, we celebrated successfully moving 30 clients and hundreds of workloads to AWS. Our extensive investments in automation since 2017, which we call FlexOps, allowed us to refactor the infrastructure, taking advantage of cloud-native services and migrating enterprise applications. The gains in efficiency across our Cloud Managed Services practice are notable and continue to grow. We now support over 35 clients on AWS, a staggering achievement in just over a year.
Remarkable Milestones
With RAMP, we achieved significant milestones, including:
- Our breadth – 30 Clients’ production workloads in AWS (50% higher ed, 25% public sector, 25% commercial/healthcare), 300+ Client enterprise workloads
- Our agility – average of 3-4 months per client migration, 15 concurrent migrations at height of RAMP
- Our depth – 320,000+ AWS Resources under Terraform control
- Our specialty – 1800+ VMs migrated to EC2, 11 Clients/77 Environments running Oracle SE2 database on PeopleSoft in AWS
Path Forward
While we are continuing to find ways to optimize the workloads we moved to AWS, RAMP has already led to increased efficiency and scalability, setting us and our clients up for future success. We and our clients have learned a lot about taking full advantage of automation and modernization. We’re using that learning to make things even better for our clients.
Conclusion
Sierra-Cedar eliminated dependency on the brittle data center space by moving to a stable cloud infrastructure provider in AWS. We set ourselves on the right path for further expansion into all things Cloud. We are excited to move forward with our clients as they begin to explore the many benefits of the migration.
If you are approaching a major CapEx spend cycle or concerned about the stability of your data center provider or concerned about the unsustainable cost of software and hardware OpEx costs, please talk to us. We will be happy to discuss your situation, understand your landscape, and provide a robust Cloud migration roadmap.
For any assistance with data center exit or Cloud migration, please reach out to us at contact@sierra-cedar.com. Stay connected with Sierra-Cedar for the latest updates and insights (www.sierra-cedar.com)
Sudhir Javangula
General Manager, Cloud Managed Services, Sierra-Cedar
Sudhir manages the Managed Services business for Sierra-Cedar with a team of cloud engineers and enterprise application administrators who provide top service to clients across the country with next-gen automation and innovation. He operates out of Sierra-Cedar Corporate HQ in Alpharetta, GA.