CASE STUDY

How We Helped A Local Government Agency to Seamlessly Migrate to the Public Cloud for Better Performance and Reliability

migration 1

At A Glance

INDUSTRY

Government

OPPORTUNITY

To assist in the configuration of the cloud server and ensure a seamless migration of current database to the cloud

SOLUTION

Docuflo DMS migration to public cloud server

RESULTS

By migrating to the cloud, the client was able to address the plaguing issues from its legacy servers and enjoy great benefits in terms of reliability, flexibility, security and maintenance needs.

The Challenge

The client has an extensive IT infrastructure serving the business with infrastructure spread across data centers. In particular, two main drivers spurred the local government agency’s cloud migration initiative.  Firstly, the existing physical servers were aging beyond economic lifespan. To top it off, both the operating system used as well as the database version were reaching “End of Life”.

At the same time, the client was also undergoing a long term, high-level strategy to drive cloud adoption.  As such, the client had decided to move all their current IT infrastructure to cloud. The migration will start with their non-critical web application systems and followed by the rest. The plan is to eventually move their production into the cloud.

How Did We Implement the Migration?

The client has been a long-time user of our Docuflo enterprise document management system (EDMS).  Our main objectives was to perform the migration as seamlessly as possible.  To achieve this, we had adopted an Agile approach for the migration to minimize the cut-off period required for the Go-Live deployment activity, mainly to reduce the disruptions to our client’s daily operations.

We had broken down the migration activity into FIVE (5) Stages:

Stage 1

This is an exploratory stage – learning about the cloud in terms of administration. Getting the necessary credentials, access rights, service accounts, basically getting all the pre-requisites right.

Stage 2

The second stage is to move our main application into the cloud Infrastructure.  Since we were implementing into a Two-Tier Security Architecture environment (namely, application and database layer), we had to ensure network connectivity is set-up right with the required communication channels securely in place.

Stage 3

Customization of our application takes place here. The 2 main areas consist of Active Directory (AD) integration and Database migration. 

Stage 4

Once our application was ready on the cloud, the necessary testing were performed – System Integration Test, User Acceptance Test, Security Penetration Test.

Stage 5

Fifth and final stage is on Go-Live deployment activities.  This is where the old hardware is decommissioned and making sure all Delta data and images had been migrated.

As with most migrations, we were lucky to be able to build a house first, buy furniture, and later plan on how to make the new environment look exactly like the old place – but better! In this case, however, the old place had a big old library which was used around the clock, and for all intents and purposes would continue to be used. We needed it in the new environment without anyone noticing it being gone. We need it in the cloud and we need it up-to-date and readily available.

Is Docuflo Best Fit for Cloud Architecture?

Docuflo is a fully localized product and therefore, ready to meet-up to the expectations of the ever evolving cloud infrastructure. Docuflo DMS is not restricted to any single Cloud provider.

The Results

With a proper system in place, the client was looking forward to migrating Docuflo DMS to the cloud server.
The DMS application is available within the client’s current network, as virtual server instances. The application is hosted on the production webserver, and the production database server located on Azure Cloud. Test server is on (staging application) and using Azure SQL production database server (staging database). Users were able to access the application via the webserver (requiring VPN if accessing out of the network environment) and committed application transactions are stored in the database server. Integration between the client’s application server and Azure SQL database server are connected on specific port and public IP address.

Clients can login into the web application using their credentials via internet with URL provided by the client.

Below is the high-level network diagram for this system:

The Benefits

Following the cloud migration exercise, the client was able to enjoy a plethora of benefits in terms of:

  • Reliability – The move to the cloud resulted in reduced dependency on ageing servers. The client can also ensure that its software components are always up-to-date as cloud servers are maintain by cloud providers.
  • Flexibility – Cloud is also flexible as it allows you to easily scale up or down as demand or new services are required.
  • Security – Security options for the cloud are available out of the box and are pretty comprehensive.  Furthermore, cloud providers own a series of tools for audit purposes.  If an incident occurs, you can quickly identify where and when that happened and who the likely actors are.
  • Maintenance – another major benefit of the cloud is the number of managed services provided. Managed services are highly useful as it takes away most of the maintenance burden, security patching, upgrades, etc, thus relieving your IT resources of onerous tasks so that they can focus on other value-adding work.

How does the Cloud compliments and helps strengthen Docuflo?

We can make use of other components available from Cloud to further reduce the operational costs required to maintain Docuflo. One of the main consideration is the cost for storage.  Our next initiative for Docuflo is to integrate to the Object Storage, a cost-effective alternative for archival storage.

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