End Of Life Service Migration

Our client is a leading nationwide Shareholder and Pension services provider who have grown to over 3500 employees across 28 locations

The Client

Our client is a leading nationwide Shareholder and Pension services provider who have grown to over 3500 employees across 28 locations internationally by developing innovative services for their clients. Knowing a impending "End of Life" event for Microsoft Operating Systems would impact their systems they led programme to eradicating the aging technology to remain compliant and competitive.

Scenario

The organisations foresight of the impact to their IT services meant there was a strong business case to create a programme to resolve and future-proof their technology estate. It was also an opportunity to reduce costs, eliminate physical hardware and simplify the estate by removing unnecessary legacy applications and services. With a legacy estate of close to 1,000 servers the challenge was to discover the servers and services being provided and convince the IT stakeholders to undertake significant elimination of servers that were fully operational.

Our Approach

To ensure a streamlined and successful programme it is essential to deliver using a service-oriented approach. This approach allows for clear identification of the services, and the ability to convince IT stakeholders to make changes on a per-service basis. Using our discovery process we rapidly removed identified servers, services and interdependencies across the client's estate, combined with our consultants who worked with the internal team to manage the associated projects and deliver the technical change. Resulting in removal of vulnerable assets from the estate without causing disruption to the business.

Client Testimonial

The solution implemented by Beyond was highly successful against challenging timelines and legacy technology, which is a testament to the expertise and investment shown in understanding the requirements and the brief.

Andy Holliman - Programme Manager Financial Services

Project Details

  • 2 Year Programme
  • 1,000+ Server decommission
  • Liaise with business stakeholders to gain buy-in and confidence
  • Service assessment using bespoke discovery techniques
  • Tailored approach — using a repeatable change process
  • Extensive documentation for legacy systems which previous had little existing documentation
  • Minimal operational impact due to joint-teams focus and approach

Business Benefits

  • Reduced potential attack vectors
  • Reduced operational cost of IT
  • Reduced legacy data centre footprint
  • Enhanced productivity - faster applications and services
  • Allowed IT to focus on critical projects and innovation
  • Creation of solid documentation enhancing or replacing existing
  • Consolidation of physical assets

Outcome

With the removal of this unsupported platform, our clients gained a more compliant infrastructure with reduced operational costs.

Outcomes Testimonial

We managed to create a solid plan based on the CMDB information provided by Beyond.

Author - Programme Manager Financial Services