Cloud Adoption General Design for global organization

The British Council organization wanted to holistically coordinate and plan their migration to the cloud. Transformation aimed at various aspects of IT. During the assessment phase, we discovered the following challenges:

• Need for consistent designs of new applications for various development teams
• No transformation methodologies for existing applications
• Need to migrate around 200 servers to the cloud
• Lack of reference architectures for various scenarios, teams make decisions on their own
• No cost controls
• Need for network consolidation for over 200 locations around the world
• No general reference for cloud migration

BlueSoft designed a complete General Design document for the entire British Council organization. The document acts as a reference point for all British Council teams regarding cloud migration. Our work included:

• Recommendations on best purchasing options for cloud resources with guidance on how to monitor and report costs
• Connectivity design for applications and British Council branches around the world
• Reference architectures and design principles for newly created cloud-based projects
• Migration strategies for existing applications (migration to IaaS or transformation to PaaS)
• Governance, Policies, restrictions, and reporting
• Security recommendations
• Rules for resource usage
• Allowed regions, resources, sizes and patterns for production and non-production environment
• Disaster Recovery designs
• Risk assessment and exit plan 

General Design is an essential document during the cloud adoption process. It acts as a reference point that keeps adoption under control. Our experience helped the British Council set precise boundaries and clear rules of cloud adoption for every development team within the organization. Some of the benefits of our work are:

1. British Council achieved a mutual understanding of the goals and principles of cloud migration among their development teams. General Design is what everyone is obliged to comply with

2. Gain confidence in designing new applications and leading modernization of the existing applications

3. Business and development teams new precisely which components they can use and what are the best architectural designs

4. The cost of cloud migration is under tight control due to detailed governance and precise measurement and reporting

5. Remote branches have a basic design for cloud connectivity

6. Cloud adoption has a solid reference point for present and future cloud projects