Evaluate

Evaluate provides trusted commercial intelligence for the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. They are data engineers who collect, calibrate, and connect the financial and technical information that the pharmaceutical industry needs.

The challenge

Evaluate was running the majority of its systems across multiple sites and utilising several technologies, including VMware, Hyper-V, and bare-metal. However, the architecture was inflexible and lacked resiliency.

The company was looking to migrate its current workloads onto AWS to take advantage of the increased flexibility offered by the public cloud, and to also gain access to managed services that were of interest. Very tight deadlines were attached to the project due to impending data centre renewal dates.

The migration was based on two principal methodologies; re-host ‘lift and shift’ for most workloads, and modernisation, which consisted of database migrations to Amazon RDS and an Elasticsearch migration to Amazon OpenSearch. These were considered quick wins for Evaluate.

The solution

Before embarking on the discovery work, Rebura supplied Evaluate with a Statement of Work. This outlined the steps involved in delivering all aspects of the project’s design and discovery stages, and the input we required from Evaluate.

Overview of key deliverables:

Application understanding – workshops and knowledge sharing with application owners to understand applications and explore potential dependencies and linked workloads.

Security – AWS access creation, least privileged security implementation, and Key Management Service options.

Networking – Understanding the goals for the AWS network setup, including Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) ranges, segregation, and cross-account connectivity.

Test migrations – Using CloudEndure, we performed test migrations of applications along with dependencies well ahead of time. This allowed application owners to fully test applications prior to the final cutover date.

Migration planning – Creation of migration plans on a per-application or function basis. To include documented dependencies and expected timelines. Migration plans also included success criteria checklists and decommissioning plans. We used this time to investigate any applications that could be improved from a high availability and resiliency perspective with minimal effort.

Creation of detailed design documents – Specifying schematics, network schemes, security groups, rules and lots more.

Centralised logging requirements

Adopted and implemented a tagging strategy - as defined with the client.

Migration

Evaluate’s migration consisted of two types. Re-Hosting ‘lift and shift’ to allow Evaluate to move the majority of its workloads within a tight deadline, and cloud adoption, which enabled a number of quick wins. For the re-hosting element, Rebura utilised CloudEndure to complete most of the heavy lifting. By using CloudEndure, Evaluate had the confidence and evidence it needed to ensure its applications would be migrated with low risk and minimal downtime.

Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE)

As with most projects we deliver, Rebura implemented a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) to ensure best practices were followed and maintained before, during, and after completion of the migration. This guaranteed a successful migration and move across to cloud-native services.

Control Tower

Based on our discussions with Evaluate, Rebura recommended the use of an AWS Control Tower to generate the initial framework for a multi-account structure, made up of core accounts and workload accounts.

Production go-live

Rebura successfully migrated Evaluate’s entire server estate from multiple existing environments. By doing so, Rebura improved the resilience and stability of the company’s applications and workloads.

The main positive outcome from this migration is that the client’s workforce can now concentrate on their day-to-day jobs and drive the company forward, rather than keeping ageing servers operational. Thanks to the knowledge transfer sessions we hosted with the tech team at Evaluate, they are also more self-sufficient.

After a period of two months, we onboarded Evaluate onto our cost optimisation platform and its environment was also right-sized, saving the business 20% in costs.