News Corp, a leading media conglomerate envisioned building a robust digital platform to distribute content that would help them reduce total cost and improve business efficiency. As part of this transformation, they were looking to address number of challenges including applications with multiple physical instances running on diverse platforms, making operations expensive, and consistently difficult.
News Corp planned to move 75% of its infrastructure and applications to cloud as part of its multi-year infrastructure transformation strategy. Virtusa team was engaged in News Corp, North America Infrastructure Transformation Program.
We leveraged our well-defined, phased, and iterative approach to migrate applications to AWS Cloud. It comprised of four phases:
- Plan
- Assess
- Migrate
- Scale
Plan
We assisted with overall program management office, managing all aspects of strategy, program governance, and benefits realization by implementing infrastructure transformation PMO (at a portfolio level) of in-progress migration and sunset plans across groups. We performed identification of target state of 1000+ applications while focusing on applications that included EOL and EOS components (Windows 2003 and Solaris). During this process, we also cleansed and updated Center for Minority Business Development (CMBD) based on portfolio analysis findings. We reviewed and enhanced cloud architecture and platform components. Furthermore, we accelerated continuous integration and deployments process by recommending enterprise tools to DevOps team and assisted them by implementing platform capabilities.
Assess
We performed macro analysis of applications leveraging a proven cloud readiness assessment framework based on business value, IT efficiency, and cloud suitability. Following which, we performed micro-analysis of number of applications leveraging structured migration approach, repeatable process, and re-usable assets limiting cost of transformation. For each of these applications, we developed understanding of current state architecture and defined cloud architecture based on patterns developed during macro analysis leveraging AWS Services like EC2, ELB, Route 53, RDS, SQS, SNS, and Containers etc. As part of Cloud Operating Model work stream, we provided recommendations on enterprise cloud security guidelines and enterprise cloud DevOps tools/methodologies.
Migrate
During Migrate phase, we implemented cloud migrations using standard DevOps technology stack such as Cloud Formation, Chef, Jenkins, GitHub, and Artifactory. We used a number of security measures offered by AWS services such as security groups, SSL, encrypted volumes, IAM, MFA to implement a secure architecture. Additionally, we created and streamlined standard DevOps scripts/cookbooks to create standard reusable assets. To ensure migration success, we provided effective program coordination across multiple LOBs (Line of Business) including management of server decommissions across the estate. With these successful migration we not only gained portfolio, process, and organization understanding but also confidence of application teams. This was instrumental in smooth Change Management.
Scale
Now, it is time to scale. We have planned to perform mass migration to accelerate the infrastructure transformation. With infrastructure going on cloud, it is essential to keep check on it. Our team is involved with cost optimization through policies, processes, and monitoring. We are not only identifying under-utilized resources in existing infrastructure but also creating automation policies to constantly check and ensure cost optimization and security governance in future.
Benefits of our solution
Our solution helped News Corp accelerate business outcomes while achieving significant benefits. We accelerated their cloud journey, improved business agility to roll out new services, and reduced time to market. Further, we reduced risk by decommissioning some of EOL and EOS systems as a result of infrastructure refresh as part of cloud migration. Operational costs were reduced by implementing a disposable and consumption based infrastructure models. Lastly, we reduced the total cost of ownership through enterprise wide solutions, re-usable templates, and repeatable process.