Migrating Multiple On-Premises Data Centers to the Cloud

Challenge

Meazure Learning, the leading provider of online testing solutions for higher education and professional credentialing organizations, delivers industry-leading technology and personalized service backed by extensive infrastructure to their end users. With their recent acquisition of Scantron, an application stack hosted across two on-prem data centers was added to their environment. Adding to the challenge, the facility leases for these data centers were about to expire and a full migration of their infrastructure was required in a very short timeframe to avoid expensive lease penalties and potential data loss. Any outages that would be required for a migration needed to take place very quickly and full production operations would need to be resumed immediately.

Solution

Infinitive migrated an entire application infrastructure into AWS by:

  • Conducting thorough assessments on AWS migration tool options and their suitability for a variety of production workloads from bare-metal MSSQL server and Oracle DB to VMware VM instances
  • Implementing terraform-powered AWS Landing Zone to afford the client a best-practice AWS environment from the start
  • Configuring the client’s Landing Zone to maintain the original private IP address schema to minimize time consuming reconfigurations of the environment
  • Developing cloud-native solutions for active directory and production database clusters by utilizing AWS Managed Directory and SQL Server optimized AMI instances
  • Deploying AWS FSx for MSSQL and Oracle database backups for all environments

Outcome

In 60 days, Infinitive successfully migrated 100 virtual machines across four environments into the AWS cloud that:

  • Provided a modern, highly available, scalable, and fully automated application infrastructure
  • Reduced costs significantly by implementing a cloud-native workload
  • Modernized applications and optimized ability to scale
  • Implemented security best practices through identity and access management (IAM), multi-factor authentication, and S3 buckets
  • Provided Meazure Learning with a clear path forward for continuing to refactor their workloads into cloud optimized managed services to further reduce costs and improve operational resiliency
Published December 12, 2022
meazure learning