Migrating Critical Business Applications to Google Cloud

Challenge

As part of a broader digital transformation initiative aimed at introducing greater scalability and flexibility into their technology stack, IGM Financial sought to move away from hosting critical business applications in physical data centers and instead move to cloud-based infrastructure. The largest of their data centers, which is based in Winnipeg, is managed by a third party and access to perform discovery assessments with automated tools was not permitted.

Solution

Recognizing the magnitude and the associated constraints of this migration effort, IGM engaged AppCentrica to develop a comprehensive cloud transformation roadmap and help them decide which public cloud provider was best suited to support their needs.

The project itself was broken down into a series of different engagements each with unique considerations. Throughout the project AppCentrica was engaged with enterprise architecture planning, developing a program governance model, various forms of technical analysis, as well as ensuring transformation efforts were balanced and not in conflict with other ongoing IT initiatives.

Additionally, AppCentrica worked across IGM’s corporate and digital technology groups to develop a consolidated application inventory, which included a detailed dependency map of applications to databases, servers, middleware and other shared infrastructure services. All in, over 250 applications and their various interdependencies were analyzed to determine the optimal migration approach – specifically, whether they should be simply rehosted, refactored, replatformed, or in some cases, retired.

Finally, based on the findings of AppCentrica’s various assessments, the team worked with key stakeholders throughout the organization to estimate the financial impact of moving to the cloud.

Outcomes

The completed cloud transformation roadmap and its associated recommendations were all delivered within a narrow 6-week timeframe and have enabled IGM to move ahead with their data center exit strategy.

Upon reviewing the data collected by AppCentrica, IGM made the decision to select the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as their public cloud provider and have approved funding for a multi-year initiative that will complete this enterprise scale migration effort.

AppCentrica continues to support IGM Financial along their cloud transformation journey and was retained to lead the migration effort. As a Google Cloud Platform Partner, the AppCentrica team is currently working in collaboration with the GCP team to plan phase two of the project and begin migrating priority-one applications.

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