Migrating to Azure without disruption

Perpetual is an ASX-listed diversified financial services company with clients ranging from large scale institutions, small businesses, financial advisers and individuals to families. It aims to protect and grow clients’ wealth through four divisions: Perpetual Asset Management Australia, Perpetual Asset Management International, Perpetual Private and Perpetual Corporate Trust. It has operations in Australia, Singapore, the Netherlands, UK and US.

After establishing their Cloud foundations, Perpetual turned to Fujitsu and its “Application Migration Factory” capability. Perpetual were seeking a proven approach, which leveraged automation and used an established team.

Perpetual moved to work with Fujitsu, its incumbent outsourced IT services provider, to complete the project of migrating approximately 220 servers in tranches over multiple weekends. Elia Anastasiadis, Project Management Practice Lead at Perpetual, says the selection of provider was driven by a need for flexibility and a specialist team that had done this before.

Anastasiadis also noted the benefit Fujitsu provided through its Global Delivery Centres. “Fujitsu’s migration factory in India made a significant contribution to the project. It was able to exploit time differences each weekend and work though issues on Friday nights in Australia and deliver solutions on Saturday mornings.”

Fujitsu’s strategy was to migrate a number of servers each weekend, fulfilling the requirement that migrated applications must be running in Azure by 6am each Monday.

What is often overlooked in a cloud migration are the key impacted services, such as firewalls, network links and security controls. Along with the appropriate planning, Fujitsu focuses on being proactive so that it can respond swiftly to issues as they arise in these spaces and elsewhere. “Fujitsu has been excellent at prioritising and working
through whatever issues were encountered, and resolving them in the short timeframes required,” Anastasiadis says.

“Fujitsu’s key resources have been brilliant. They have taken this project on as their own, and it shows. We’ve dealt with a lot of tricky technical issues in a very short period. Overall, the migrations have gone well with minimal disruption. Fujitsu has done a great job.”

Fujitsu was responsible for the technical validation and verification of Perpetual’s migration approach, the analysis of internal systems, and guidance on the best approach to moving to Azure. The scope included sizing the Azure environment appropriately, and the development of rollback plans to avoid disruption in the event of any migration problems.

However, Anastasiadis notes that the contingency plans were not needed. “We have not had to roll back a single migration, or part of a migration. Before we embarked on this journey there were serious concerns around roll back, especially of critical systems: we did not want to be rolling back from the cloud.”

The migration has already delivered benefits, enabling Perpetual to review its IT resources, remove redundancies and inefficiencies, and streamline its systems. Importantly, Perpetual is on a journey to take advantage of cloud services to optimise, scale and innovate its services.

“We’ve been able to take a critical look at all our applications and systems and streamline the environment,” he adds. “We’ve reduced our complexity significantly.”

Anastasiadis concludes: “We will continue to enhance automation and leverage new functionality to make our environment more efficient. We can optimise and scale to suit the needs of our business. We have more capability to transform and innovate our services.”