OUTCOMES
Results of partnership
Optimisation
of ¼ of the environment
Before the migration, over 50 virtual machines that were either unused or barely utilised were optimised, reducing overall resource demand.
48% reduction
in migration costs
Architectural and operational changes reduced migration costs by nearly half compared to the original lift-and-shift assumptions.
20% cost reduction
post-migration
Following the migration, network traffic was reduced thanks to architectural improvements, leading to further decreases in ongoing infrastructure costs.
PROJECT
Our client made the decision to fully transition to a new IT infrastructure, as the existing one had become largely outdated and was no longer supported. They were considering several options and remained open to adopting new technologies. They asked us to prepare three alternative scenarios: remaining on-premise with the purchase of entirely new infrastructure (including network components, storage arrays, servers, and a new backup solution); leasing the complete set of hardware from an external provider; or fully migrating the infrastructure to Microsoft Azure.
We carried out a three-year cost analysis for each scenario, taking into account projected changes in electricity and data centre costs, hardware replacement expenses, and — in the case of Azure — subscription fees and cloud network traffic costs. The evaluation also included the estimated workload required for implementing each migration scenario.
After summarising the costs and comparing them against the client’s actual business requirements — without favouring any particular approach — the client decided to proceed with the Azure migration. The project was carried out with our support.
PROJECT TIME
November 2022 – present
INDUSTRY
IT
COUNTRY
Poland
Our client is a medium-sized software house that had more than 200 on-site machines at the start of the project. The client approached Altkom Software directly to have their cloud migration potential analysed. They picked us because of our expertise in Azure, which includes a wide portfolio of consulting, architecture planning, environment configuration, security and cloud cost and resource optimisation services.
During the initial cost analysis and, later on, the actual migration process, the following aspects had to be taken into account:
The client’s original environment was very complex, divided into many smaller projects and dedicated infrastructures that were hardly integrated between one another. This could be likened to a billion small islands, which were to remain in place as far as business was concerned. We managed to maintain this complexity and still achieve a 25% infrastructure optimisation, which allowed the initial forecasts of migration costs to be cut practically by half.
ACTIONS
We performed a comprehensive analysis of our client’s machine usage, resources and the architecture already in place.
Before the migration, we analysed the extent to which our client was using the virtual machines already in place. These data allowed us to design a brand new architecture for the target environment from scratch and optimise more than 50 machines that were scarcely used or not used at all. The new design also incorporated all the guidelines that had to be met for the architecture to meet ISO 27001 requirements.
In addition, we developed new scenarios for operating the client’s environments, so that the software house would only need to pay for the hours they actually used. An important step in the optimisation process involved cleaning up their storage space. Even before the migration, we changed the structures used for storing data and large numbers of files, and deleted outdated or redundant elements.
All these tasks took us just three months, but the migration as such was spread out over several more so as not to disrupt the software development process. As a result, the client’s team hardly noticed the migration as it happened. Importantly, our cooperation did not stop with the end of the project; we continue to analyse the client’s costs and budget on a daily basis, and often suggest and deploy architecture improvements.
