AWS Migration Case-Study: Asset Solution Group

The Business 

For over fifty years Retail & Asset Solutions and Vehicle & Asset Solutions (part of the Asset Solutions Group) have been working to provide market-leading audit and stocktaking services to the retail industry. When the time came in 2018 to separate the business from their parent company and establish their infrastructure separately – RAS / VAS turned to AWS Partner 3Gi Technology Ltd to help them make their move to the cloud. 

The Challenge

Knowing that RAS / VAS has incurred a particular amount of technical debt over the years, the team needed safe-housing at an industrial level to effectively warehouse their existing infrastructure. All the while stepping through a multiyear campaign to rebuild their platform to be cloud-native. 

Once AWS was discussed and selected as an option, the core challenges were that of Time and Complexity - with a tight 12-month program to get entirely out of their existing data center arrangement and completely decouple their infrastructure from the parent while building their AWS environment.    

Working in partnership with RAS / VAS, the following challenges were agreed:

• They needed the flexibility of EC2 to be able to bring up all the VMs in test to perform many mock migrations to ensure no business impact for a very complicated task.
• They had to ensure that a strict security regime was met, and that they were able to utilise security features within AWS to demonstrate to external clients the security of the new platform.
• They had to demonstrate recoverability and RPO and RTO timings from the business to prove to the client base we had “upgraded” the technology stack instead of going backward.
• They had to demonstrate scale in the new solution as RAS / VAS had been bought by a private equity firm that needed to ensure that the new platform was able to scale the business to meet aggressive Quarter by Quarter targets.

The Solution

Initially, we harnessed the mass, flexible power of EC2 and S3 to be able to clone the current environment in minutes, this was accomplished by using the ability to import VMWare VMDK’s into AWS as EC2 AMIs. We were able to test migrating every separate facet of the infrastructure so that all of the individual components of the platform could be tested while in isolation. This method enabled us to see what directory service-reliant applications and services we could pick apart from the old legacy systems in what way to ensure minimum risk during the migration. 

With the core systems now migrated into EC2, we then began the process to unpick the Virtual Machine dependent infrastructure. This work meant we could then look to migrate the platform to more serverless microservices infrastructure, breaking down the complete architecture stack into elements to move to more native cloud engineering.

With the core systems now migrated into EC2, we then began the process to unpick the Virtual Machine dependent infrastructure. This work meant we could then look to migrate the platform to more serverless microservices infrastructure, breaking down the complete architecture stack into elements to move to more native cloud engineering.

Outcome and Results

By following the key processes above, the business was able to meet the objectives to decouple from the parent within the tight time limit. AWS allowed RAS / VAS to be able to ring-fence legacy systems to buy time for the tech teams to break the infrastructure down into smaller chunks, allowing the company to adopt a more microservices approach.

AWS allowed us to achieve the project through the flexibility and scalability of the platform - the ability to instantly resize, change, migrate whilst being able to have a clear understanding of the costs involved was the key to success here.