Situation
After a decade of aggressively investing in automating business processes and creating mobile, web and analytics capabilities, a large insurance company faced running out of data center space. Building a new data center or expanding an existing data center would be a large capital investment and would divert funds from market growth opportunities. It was also clear that owning a dedicated data center was no longer necessary. Once the company decided not to invest in expanding or building a new data center, they turned to finding an alternative for capacity in the short term and a long term solution to adapt to their evolving business.
Solution
The company’s CIO, now a NextLevel partner, led a technical team to create a data center strategy based on moving to the cloud. Weighing private, public and hybrid cloud solutions against business requirements, a hybrid solution was selected. At this point the CIO created the migration roadmap, multi-phased implementation plan and secured approval from the executive team and board of directors.
Results
The strategy and multi-phased approach met the immediate need to create more data center capacity, improve operational data center functions, expand disaster recovery capabilities and support the company’s goal to deliver new market-facing solutions.
- An 85% reduction of capital costs by moving to the cloud over building a new data center.
- Reduced testing expense in half by quickly provisioning test resources when needed and just as quickly de-provisioning them when the project was completed.
- Expanded disaster recovery capabilities beyond the mission critical level.
- Improved the allocation of onsite data center resources to core system administration functions.
- Improved operational cycle times to upgrade and patch systems within compliance objectives.
- Successful execution of multiple disaster recovery tests validating all mission critical functions.
- Path forward to migrate production systems as expertise in managing cloud environments matured.
- Budget and timeline commitments met.
- Best vendor agreement through simultaneous negotiation with the top two vendors.
- Reduced existing power and space requirements through the consolidation, retirement and virtualization of systems.