Mapping and Migration of Enterprise-Class Workloads to AWS Using ATADATA from Deloitte

By Larry Lopez, VP, Cloud Migration Delivery & Pre-Sales Practice – Deloitte
By JB McGinnis, Managing Director & AWS Sales Excellence Leader – Deloitte
By William Ying, Partner Solutions Architect Manager, North America & Global Solutions Leader, Deloitte – AWS
By Steve Bollers, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect, Global Cybersecurity Leader, Deloitte – AWS

Migrating enterprise workloads to the cloud can deliver greater agility and enhanced business performance. Cloud migration can be a manual, costly, and time-consuming process, however, that taxes IT resources and results in business disruption and downtime.

Modernization can ultimately drive future business and serve customers better with higher efficiency through automation.

Within five years, more than 40% of enterprise workloads will run in the public cloud. Despite all of the potential that cloud offers, getting from a few proof of concept (PoC) projects to the full-scale migration of hundreds of applications, interwoven with databases, external services, and distributed legacy infrastructure (not to mention regulatory and security imperatives), is a big ask.

Even cloud-savvy teams must look beyond technology to meet the challenge to disrupt, transform, and repeat.

A fully automated refactoring process can help migrate the code and data while helping to reduce the chance of error and accelerating the time frame. Businesses are able to operate as usual during the entire development process. In the end, a powerful digital transformation can open all sorts of opportunities.

In this post, we’ll examine how a technology, such as ATADATA offered by Deloitte, can make the journey to cloud possible 1) without disruption to the business; 2) efficiently through Amazon Web Services (AWS) API integration; and 3) with low risk through the integrated discovery technology.

Starting the Cloud Journey

As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with the Migration Competency, Deloitte has a unique perspective on common migration concerns and has developed a suite of tools to address each one. These concerns include knowing your applications, testing before you leap, and using different stacks for different apps.

Know Your Applications

Define what the customer means by app, and then build a strong foundation for the long haul by understanding that cloud migrations rely on an accurate, up-to-date inventory and dependency map to prioritize, accelerate adoption, and reduce risk.

Test Before You Leap

Assess organizational readiness and then drive momentum with an initial minimum viable product (MVP) approach designed to build confidence and demonstrate security and compliance in a public cloud environment.

Put discovery engineers at the core to establish smart migration wave planning, and put migration engineers at the fore to minimize risk and drive scalability through automation.

Overall readiness will depend on establishing a robust landing zone on the AWS Cloud, bringing best practices around account management, security, networking, and other core foundational services.

Different Stacks for Different Apps

How far and how fast the customer can move from their legacy footprint to cloud-native scalability depends on understanding the implications across the stack.

Whether using rehosting or refactoring, evolving architectures promise auto scaling, self-healing, and hardware-agnostic operation. This needs to be balanced against risk and compliance needs while keeping an eye on vendor lock-in.

What is ATADATA?

ATADATA is a cloud management platform of scalable technology and automated solutions to streamline the mapping, migration, and management of enterprise-class workloads to AWS.

Many enterprise organizations see a 36-month payback period for manual migrations. With ATADATA’s automation and mass-migration scalability, clients can realize significant cost and operational savings with a return on investment (ROI) within 12 months.

ATADATA consists of the following suite of integrated solutions:

• ATASphere
• ATAVision
• CloudCast
• ATAMotion
• ATAMirror
• ATAGuard
• ATATransform

ATASphere: A simple console interface, completely agentless operations, and borderless automation and portability to map, migrate, and manage workloads across an any-to-any combination of cloud environments.

Figure 1 – ATASphere managing discovery and migration jobs.

ATAVision: An automated discovery solution that uses an agentless architecture to automate data collection, generate on-demand reports, and create deeper insights into your IT infrastructure, regardless of the platform.

 Figure 2 – Affinity mapping showing application end points.

CloudCast: Enables the selection of any number of servers in an AWS infrastructure and estimates the costs of that selection across multiple cloud platforms.

Figure 3 – CloudCast sizing recommendations and cost estimates.

ATAMotion: Purpose-built for enterprise cloud migration with agentless deployment, automated transfer of live workloads to any target environment, and orchestrated infrastructure provisioning—all with minimal business disruption. Streamline cloud migrations of enterprise applications like SAP, Oracle, SQL, and more.

Figure 4 – ATAMotion status updates in real-time.

ATAMirror: A cutover management solution that keeps source and target servers in sync throughout workload migrations for a more convenient, simplified cutover.

Figure 5 – ATAMirror keeping target in sync after baseline migration completes.

ATAGuard: A multi-cloud disaster recovery (DR) solution that automates the protection and recovery of servers and applications across any combination of physical, virtual, private, and public clouds.

Figure 6 – ATAGuard keeping DR target in sync using snapshots.

ATATransform: Upgrades multiple live Windows servers and replatforms live Linux workloads in a single stage, with automated provisioning. Used for in-place upgrades, or with ATAMotion for enterprise migrations, ATATransform’s agentless deployment supports installation inside and outside of firewalls, in both managed and self-service models.

Figure 7 – ATATransform upgrading Windows to supported cloud instances.

Delivering Value at State of Colorado with ATADATA

The CBMS transformation project sought to modernize the State of Colorado’s Integrated Eligibility (IE) system. Specifically, the State wanted to move the Colorado Benefits Management System (CBMS) to Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

More than 5,000 county and medical assistance site employees across the state use CBMS to determine citizens’ eligibility for food, cash, and medical assistance. Each month, the system is used to process approximately 30,000 new client applications and 40,000 client reauthorizations. In addition, CBMS communicates with approximately 50 external systems.

The modernization effort included both an application overhaul and migration to AWS and Salesforce.

Deloitte was selected as the primary technology partner for the multi-phase transformation program. The first phase was the legacy application migration to AWS, and Colorado’s success with this phase helped position Deloitte to deliver the upcoming phases. The future phases plan to complete the transformation project with the application user interface (UI) modernization on Salesforce.

Approach

Deloitte created value by providing ATADATA expertise, leveraging firm assets and technology delivery capabilities.

The Deloitte differentiated solution included:

• Cloud expertise to design and build the ATADATA solutions that enabled the migration of Colorado’s IE system to the cloud.
• Validating, troubleshooting, and preparing the team for migrations, specifically focused on determining AWS migration schemas and identifying potential system issues.
• Leveraging ATAVision (internal tool) to allow the State of Colorado’s team to capture critical server information in preparation for the AWS migration.
• Successfully migrating over 300 workloads, both Windows and Linux, to AWS.

Solution Architecture

The ATASphere 2.0 console software was installed on a server located in the State of Colorado’s secure environment. With ATASphere installed, the ATAVision discovery module was activated to perform inventory, utilization, and affinity mapping for migration move group planning. No software was installed on the source candidate servers targeted for discovery.

Using ATAVision, target sizing was completed using the CloudCast feature, and move groups were automatically created for the migration phase. Once move group planning was validated and confirmed by application owners, the ATAMotion software was activate for migrations.

ATAMotion contacted the AWS APIs, created the targets, migrated the data, and booted the target servers. Once the baseline copy completed, ATAMirror was used to keep all of the large database servers in sync in preparation for the cutover window. All migration and data sync activities were performed live while all business operations continued.

During cutover, the final sync was activated while all databases and open files were flushed to disk for ATAMirror to pick up the data blocks remaining.

All activities were performed using one ATASphere console software running on a Windows Server.

Figure 8 – Logical view of the ATASphere solution for the State of Colorado.

1. ATAVision performing discovery and migration planning.
2. ATAMotion creating baseline copy in the target.
3. ATAMirror keeping source and target environment in-sync using ATAMirror in preparation of the migration cutover window.

Results

The State of Colorado was able to leverage ATADATA for both assessment (Vision) and migration (Motion), successfully migrating the legacy CBMS application to AWS with no business outages.

Moving to a more modern platform allowed to create a more modular design, increasing the State’s ability to respond to service demand and agility to adapt to changes in service offerings from the State.

Summary

Whether you are just beginning your cloud journey or have already started to realize the agility, cost savings, and increased performance and availability of running workloads on the cloud, you have undoubtedly discovered the importance of using migration best practices.

Any mistakes made along the way, can lead to prolonged downtime, costly outages, data loss, or risk. Successful migrations require detailed assessment, planning, preparation, and cohesive tools that provide visibility, protection, and management over the entire discovery, planning, and migration process.

The ATADATA suite on AWS combines Deloitte’s proven expertise, methodology, and tools with the security, reliability, and scalability of AWS without vendor lock-in. Discover, as the State of Colorado did, that even large and complex migrations (including SAP, Oracle, SQL Server) are manageable without downtime or disruption to the business.

ATADATA’s automation and mass-migration scalability eliminates manual migration tasks, enabling teams to focus more on right sizing and modernizing applications and workloads. ATADATA clients typically realize significant cost and operational savings with a ROI within 12 months.

Take the next step in your cloud transformation journey with ATADATA on AWS.

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Deloitte – AWS Partner Spotlight

Deloitte is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and MSP. Through a network of professionals, industry specialists, and an ecosystem of alliances, they assist clients in turning complex business issues into opportunities for growth, helping organizations transform in the digital era.

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