Cloud Migration Case Study

The existing in house infrastructure was comprised of over 20 servers of
varying age and specification, split across two small data center sites to provide resilience and redundancy.
Storage and other supporting infrastructure was again a mixed bag of capabilities.

Overall, the environment was starting to show stress signs relating to
performance, reliability and options for rapid recovery, due to the unplanned manner in which it had grown.

A major review of capability and a system upgrade was required, and various options were examined across in house replacement, hybrid solutions across
cloud and in house, private cloud deployment and outsourcing to specialist legal service infrastructure providers.

After review of current and longer-term business requirements, a number of
basic viable options were identified.
After a considered design review of these options, it came down to two specific options – either a hybrid solution with a mix of local and public cloud services,
or a complete IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) migration.

These two options were fully reviewed and costed. It quickly became clear that a full IaaS migration would avoid a lot of the design compromises associated with a hybrid deployment.

The decision was made to deploy an AWS solution capable of handling the demands of over 180 intensive users.
Every part of the existing IT environment was challenged to determine its business fit and value, its life cycle position and its future return on investment.

Agility

Servers, storage, networking and overall computer capacity are constantly being refactored and adjusted to align tightly with the business needs during a phased project approach.

Resilience

Even if the office was destroyed, Fisher Jones Greenwood would be able to continue with business as usual, with rapid recovery of IT infrastructure and data in the cloud.

Flexibility

In a traditional local infrastructure, the  infrastructure would have taken months to procure and deploy; and the business needs would have had to be shoe-horned into what was purchased regardless of fit.