Success Story Manufacturing

AutoProtect Group Migrates to AWS to Drive More Efficient Infrastructure

AutoProtect Group’s migration journey with Apexon started with AWS Immersion Days for Security and Containerization. These immersion days allowed AutoProtect Group to upskill their staff in preparation for managing a future infrastructure state on AWS. After successful completion of the Immersion Days, AutoProtect Group were then positioned to begin project planning the migration of one of its core datacenters to AWS.

“When considering migrating our workload to AWS we could see the myriad of benefits but needed to ensure that our path to realising them was addressing any risks effectively throughout. With Apexon we were able to effectively combat each of those risks.

The AWS immersion days, for me, demonstrates the true power of working with a partner with the breadth of capability that Apexon have. For us, running infrastructure on AWS was only one piece of the puzzle, the more critical piece being ensuring that we have the capability to maintain and grow it once our services are there. The trainers rapidly upskilled our staff in key areas, like security and monitoring, to ensure once the project was completed we were best positioned to uphold our high standards for resiliency and security.

This programme of work was not simply a lift and shift, but an entire paradigm shift in our company’s approach to managing IT resources, and Apexon have excelled in helping us with every stage of that journey.”

Callum Smith
Head Of Development
AutoProtect

Apexon conducted two weeks of Blueprinting with AutoProtect Group to understand the high-level requirements and challenges. This included gathering current datacenter costs and the proposed cost improvements based on transitioning its existing on-premise infrastructure to the AWS cloud.

Apexon helped the customer select AWS as a cloud provider based on cloud architecture principles, cloud best practices, design considerations and Apexon’s own experience working with AWS.

APAdmin was the major component in AutoProtect Group’s technology landscape along with Auto Process, IClaims, Agent Web, WebForms and Dev Express UI all supporting overall business operations and functions. Migration of all of the above to AWS would be required in the long term.

There were several factors from the assessment which helped define the migration strategy.

The AWS account structure, landing zone architecture, VPC design, on-prem connectivity, and migration blueprint were designed and implemented during this phase.

The migration waves were planned and executed based on application dependencies. No specific migration tool was used. This was a Blue-Green deployment. First, Apexon launched all the resources and configured the replica environment on AWS. Then detailed cut-over plan was prepared and discussed with all stakeholders for seamless production migration. Then it was executed by cloud experts and migration engineers from Apexon.

Operational readiness and ongoing support were key to a successful migration. The Apexon team provided all required Operations Guide documentation and the migration team provided interactive training sessions on Cloud Operations, different AWS Services used for applications, database and Terraform/Terragrunt (IAC).

The Apexon migration team implemented automation on monitoring, backup, and scheduling start-stop of non-production instances to save cost. The team also implemented the required controls to ensure security posture and cost optimization.