The Situation 

A US medical company was beginning the process of a migration to a hybrid cloud model using AWS to host several high priority application services. As part of the migration process there were many configuration changes required for each device to meet their AWS infrastructures requirements.

The Task 

The customer’s devices being moved to the new AWS platform needed to be migrated with minimal downtime, numerous configuration changes and without impacting the confidence of any end-users. Towers Associates were engaged to bring methodology, communications, scheduling, analysis and planning to make for reliable and predictable migration events.

• Up to 20 post migration activities, including network updates, configuration changes and version uplifts per device.
• Short migration windows to perform device cutovers and hand back healthy devices in the new target platform.
• Up to 2000 tasks in each cutover runbook to be performed during the migration window.

The Action 

Towers Associates worked with the customer to ensure that each migration event went smoothly and as predicted with minimal impact the end-users. To achieve this, we:

• Fully automated pre migration checks.
• Fully automated pre-seeding (replication)(AWS MGN) of devices prior to event.
• Fully automated test migration process (AWS MGN).
• Fully automated cutover process (AWS MGN).
• Fully automated post migration configuration process (AWS SSM).

The Result 

We performed numerous migration events successfully with zero rollbacks for the customer. Over these migration events we moved all the required devices and applications from the initial source environments. The lessons learned and the confidence installed in the customer has been a driver in pushing them to start the process of assessing the remaining source environments for the next phase of their transformation journey.