Devoteam helped to achieve significant lower operating costs and efforts, release resources for building new services, reduce time to market while maximising performance by migrating to a scalable and secure cloud environment.
About the customer
WESSLING GmbH provides analytical laboratory services. The company offers testing and analysis of ground water, soil samples, food and consumer products, and pharmaceuticals. WESSLING markets its services to agricultural, food processing, pharmaceutical and other industries.
The Challenge
WESSLING operated data centres in two different locations, with a total of 144 virtual machines. Through ongoing analysis, the company identified only 53 viable candidates for cloud migration. As some of these workloads involved Oracle, Bare Metal Solution for Oracle was used to comply with licensing requirements.
On-premise data centres often face challenges related to financial efficiency, security and resilience, and operations. WESSLING’s analysis highlighted these areas as key focus points for the migration effort, which aimed to achieve cost savings, ensure robust security and resilience, and optimise operational efficiency in the cloud.
For us Devoteam is a real partnership and like our own colleagues on a daily basis. Very friendly colleagues and a high level of knowledge. On the other hand, it was always a pleasure to learn together new ways and solutions which you are facing but not expect when you try to migrate your own outdated data centre.
The Goal
Our primary goal was to achieve a lower cost while maximising performance by fitting more virtual machines into our cloud resources. By paying only for the resources they use, our customers avoid unnecessary expenses and maintenance efforts associated with on-premise IT assets that they may only use occasionally.
Another essential benefit is the ability to scale applications and data seamlessly, without incurring any downtime or requiring new infrastructure investments. Additionally, we offer built-in, one-click backup and recovery capabilities, which improves business continuity and minimises the risk of data loss.
To ensure secure access control and data protection, we have implemented the principle of least privilege by utilising IAM permissions. We have also implemented data residency to comply with GDPR regulations and guarantee the safe handling of sensitive data.
In summary, our desired outcome was to provide our customer with a cost-effective, scalable, and secure cloud environment that offers a range of built-in features to support their business continuity and data protection needs.
The Solution
We’ve constructed a landing zone for our customer to build cloud foundations for the Google Cloud VMware engine (GCVE) and Bare Metal Solution for Oracle.
Prior to beginning the project, we performed a migration assessment to evaluate the current infrastructure and tailor solutions to the customer’s specific needs. With the help of the Google Cloud VMware Engine, we built a hosting environment and executed the migration in four planned waves, using the VM Migration Factory to ensure agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
During the project, we also identified opportunities to optimise and modernise the customer’s applications, which we believe could provide additional value.
The Methodology
- Developing a modularised architecture for the GCP solution, including the underlying platform components needed.
- Developing the operational model for the cloud solution functional components (platform and infrastructure services needed).
- Determining computing resource requirements for the functional components (including their respective platform components).
- Determining backup requirements.
- Determining scalability and high availability requirements for each of the components.
- Determining performance requirements, probable bottleneck and failure points of each of the functional components.
- Followed DevOps model using CICD methodology with OIDC.
- Performing a fit-gap analysis for the components against the target GCP environment.
- Based on the above results, scalability and high availability requirements as identified designs re-factor the solution and deployment architecture to enable large compute requirements on GCP.
- Determining the cost of hosting the solution.
The most remarkable changes are the possibilities to use managed services and the whole backup & disaster recovery environment
The Results
Our customer can benefit from the built-in, one-click backup and recovery capabilities offered by the service, which can improve their business continuity.
With the ability to scale their applications and data up or down without downtime, WESSLING can avoid investing in new infrastructure. They can also fit more VMs to achieve optimal performance and lower costs. By paying only for the cloud resources they use, WESSLING can avoid the expense of maintaining IT assets they only use occasionally.
Google Cloud Platform offers a range of services and options that can expand WESSLING’s applications and web services as needed, with exceptional network and server infrastructure. The managed services offered by GCP are particularly well-suited to emerging technologies such as Machine Learning, AI, and Big Data, which may benefit our customer.
The environment is secure, with strict organisation policy constraints and IAM permissions with least privilege, which can help protect company’s data. GCP is compliant with various regulations such as GDPR, PCI-DSS, and HIPAA, which can help our customer meet their compliance needs.
Want to build cloud foundations and secure your data and applications like WESSLING did? Contact us.
