How Version 1 Migrated Martin Currie’s Windows Workloads to AWS to Enable Agility and Innovation

Martin Currie held its technical estate in datacentres in the United Kingdom. This comprised over 120 applications, most of which were residing on Windows operating systems and interacted with SQL Server databases. The datacentre contract was expiring in 12 months, and the migration had to be performed at a blistering pace without interruption to the organization or its customers. Version 1 helped Martin Currie migrate the workloads to AWS over a period of 12 months. We’ll also explore how Version 1 continues to help modernize the company’s workloads using managed AWS services.

Version 1 is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Service Provider (MSP) with the AWS Migration Competency. Version 1 is also an AWS Public Sector Partner and AWS Solution Provider.

Version 1 and Martin Currie had an existing partnership, with Version 1 providing support across their database and applications environment over the previous five years. Based on this strong relationship and Version 1’s proven AWS expertise, Version 1 was selected to be Martin Currie’s migration partner. Martin Currie was also looking for a partner that was close geographically to its headquarters in Scotland, where Version 1 has an established presence.

Prior to performing the migration, Martin Currie’s position was assessed by using the AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART). This assessment provided a readiness plan across the organization’s business, people, process, platform, operations, and security capabilities.

The Migration Evaluator gave Martin Currie insight into their current infrastructure on the datacentre, and detailed reports were generated containing workload utilization statistics. This analysis helped determine the most appropriate and cost-effective resources to deploy on AWS.

Version 1 provided Martin Currie with guidance and input, including AWS architecture design, cost optimization, security, reliability, performance, and operations. These pillars were based on AWS Well-Architected Framework best practices.

The team of AWS experts at Version 1 worked closely with Martin Currie to design and architect the estate on AWS for scalability and high reliability.

Though Phase 1 was primarily leveraging a “lift and shift” approach to complete the migration with the tight timelines, the aim was to reduce the operational overhead and overall cost.

The following diagram shows the high-level architecture designed by Version 1 to provide resiliency and high availability for Martin Currie.

Figure 1 – Martin Currie’s AWS platform.

With the deployment and output of AWS Migration Evaluator, Martin Currie was able to see detailed reports of their on-premises inventory. The utilization of resources was analyzed, and this helped in right-sizing the company’s AWS solutions. Some of Martin Currie’s existing resources were over-provisioned and right-sizing their resources resulted in significant cost savings. With the use of tagging and AWS Billing and Cost Management, an ongoing review was carried out to ensure Martin Currie operated at cost efficiency.

Security and privacy was dealt with the upmost importance. Following the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, Version 1 made use of multiple AWS security services to secure Martin Currie’s AWS environments, applications, and data.

Access and privilege is strictly controlled using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), while data are encrypted at rest using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS). Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled for the user WorkSpaces and application accesses.

Networks were secured using private endpoints, network security groups, and network access control lists.

Designing for High Availability and Disaster Recovery

As Martin Currie’s existing datacentre was in Scotland, the eu-west-2 region was chosen as the primary region for hosting workloads on AWS.

The core business applications are spread across multiple AWS Availability Zones to enable high availability for the applications in the event of technical issues in a single zone.

Version 1 worked with Martin Currie on a disaster recovery scoping exercise with a multi-region plan being implemented.

The migration was carried out using CloudEndure Migration. This service allowed Version 1 to simplify the lift and shift of Martin Currie’s resources to AWS.

The CloudEndure Agent was deployed to the datacentre machines and allowed communication back to AWS. Test runs ironed out any issues that arose during the production cutover.

To reduce the management and maintenance of files, Amazon FSx was deployed. This allowed for files to be protected and backed up as part of the configuration. The low-cost file storage was provisioned based on the amount of the storage required.

Using all of the AWS technologies mentioned in this post, along with the expertise of Version 1, Martin Currie successfully migrated their applications to AWS within the expected period.

Having performed the migration successfully, Version 1, AWS, and Martin Currie were able to collaborate and provide synergistic value to the wider organization.

Martin Currie’s existing arrangements were inefficient. They incurred significant costs for under-utilized resources. By moving to AWS, they adopted a partial operating expenditure model that was more efficient and had a greater alignment with the company’s operating model. This is forecasted to lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their technology stack.

Migrating its infrastructure to AWS means Martin Currie will be in a better position to leverage innovation using cloud-native services. It allows Martin Currie to be agile, flexible, and respond to market trends and competitors by taking advantage of the scale at which AWS operates.

“Taking advantage of AWS services such as the Migration Evaluator (formerly TSO logic) meant we were able to audit our entire technology enterprise and select the appropriate, right-sized, services in AWS,” says Fletcher.

“This also enabled us to look for opportunities to rationalize our infrastructure estate. The cloud migration is forecast to significantly reduce costs by up to 30 percent and allow Martin Currie to take advantage of cloud technology whilst accelerating the agility of our solutions and opportunities to innovate.”

Additionally, Fletcher added: “In terms of our commercial objective of going cloud-first at Martin Currie, moving to AWS helps us in many ways. We have seen a reduction in operational costs since moving from our datacentre, while massively increased cloud adoption across our estate and our agility in cloud service adoption. Through this initiative, we have laid the foundations for our next phases of modernization in the cloud,” adds Fletcher.

Based on Version 1’s strong relationship with Martin Currie and deep AWS Expertise, it stood to reason that Martin Currie would additionally engage Version 1 as its AWS Managed Service Partner to continue to support and optimise its estate following completion of the project delivery.

Version 1 is an AWS Premier Partner, and an AWS MSP Partner. In order to obtain the MSP Partner designation, MSP Partners meet the AWS Managed Service Provider Program requirements, including a third-party audit of their MSP capabilities. AWS MSP Partners are skilled at cloud infrastructure and application migration and deliver value to customers by offering support in four key areas:

1) Plan & Design, 2) Build & Migrate, 3) Run & Operate, and 4) Optimise.

Version 1 completed the transition and go-live of Martin’s Currie’s AWS Managed Service in July of 2020 while continuing to work with the customer on final optimisations through to September 2020.

If you are still on-premises and feeling cautious about moving to cloud, engage with Version 1 for a cloud readiness assessment.