Cloud Adoption General Design for global organization

Cloud adoption is not an easy task. It requires a well-thought strategy, clear goals, and proper reference guidelines. All teams starting from the business through security, operations to developers and architects have to work according to standard rules and towards common goals. For the British Council, we prepared a General Design document that helped the entire organization consistently transform their IT towards modern cloud-based solutions.

Public Sector

Cloud Adoption General Design for global organization

Challenge

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

Solution

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

Results

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:

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
Gain confidence in designing new applications and leading modernization of the existing applications
Business and development teams new precisely which components they can use and what are the best architectural designs
The cost of cloud migration is under tight control due to detailed governance and precise measurement and reporting
Remote branches have a basic design for cloud connectivity
Cloud adoption has a solid reference point for present and future cloud projects

Client's view

Adam Suchocki

Enterprise Architect, Cloud Solutions Architect at British Council

Team of professionals. They have designed a complex cloud adoption strategy for our entire organization. Two hundred data centers, 80 business applications, and over a thousand servers, they have addressed all our needs. As a result, we were able to build consistent migration strategies for our current and future projects. Working with BlueSoft was a pleasure for us.