An overview of the customer

TechForward is a rapidly growing B2B SaaS firm that offers communication and project management solutions to mid-market and enterprise clients. The business had very few customers when it was first established in 2014. With more than 2,500 commercial clients and 180,000 users, it is a significant participant in the project management industry today. Its platform manages mission-critical workflows for clients in a range of industries, such as manufacturing, professional services, and construction.

The difficult

In late 2020, TechForward reached out to us because of significant infrastructure problems that were endangering their capacity to grow and please clients:

• Scalability Limitations: Due to its on-premises infrastructure's inability to handle peak loads, performance was declining during times of high usage.
• Problems with dependability: User confidence and satisfaction suffered as a result of the average monthly 12-hour unplanned platform downtime.
• Exorbitant infrastructure costs: In order to maintain and expand its data center infrastructure, which needed large capital expenditures, it had to divert funds from product development.
• restricted. specific to a given area The user experience for clients in Europe and Asia was impacted by latency issues because data centers were only situated in North America.
• bottlenecks in growth In addition to impeding innovation, the manual provisioning and setup of the development and testing environments extended the release cycle.
• Security issues: A thorough examination of the company's security posture exposed a number of flaws as it grew and attracted larger commercial clients.

When TechForward lost a big business agreement worth more than $1 million due to platform reliability and worldwide performance issues, the situation got out of hand. "That was a wake-up call for us," adds TechForward's CTO, Sarah Chen. Even though we had created an amazing product, our infrastructure was beginning to work against us rather than for us. We knew that in order to support our expansion objectives and meet the demands of our corporate clients, a significant change was necessary.

Our Approaches

We developed a strategic cloud migration plan after carefully examining the organization's technology environment, needs, and expansion objectives in order to address present problems and position TechForward for long-term success.

Phase 1: Plan and Evaluate (two months)

To ensure that the migration would meet both technical and business objectives, we began by creating a thorough study and plan:

• Application Assessment: A thorough analysis of the application's dependencies, architecture, and performance characteristics was carried out.
• Mapping the current infrastructure and determining its elements, dependencies, and performance bottlenecks were all part of an infrastructure evaluation.
• Assessing Cloud Providers: The unique performance, worldwide reach, and unique service needs of TechForward were contrasted with those of the leading cloud service providers.
• TCO Analysis: The current and projected cloud costs were analyzed using a comprehensive total cost of ownership model.
• A phased migration strategy was created with exact due dates, success criteria, and risk-reduction protocols.

Setting realistic expectations and bringing stakeholders together around a shared objective required this stage. "The evaluation phase was eye-opening," says Michael Rodriguez, vice president of engineering. "Even though we believed we understood our infrastructure, the thorough analysis shown bottlenecks and linkages we were unaware of." It helped us create a compelling business case for the move in addition to the technical benefits.

Phase 2: Planning for Cloud Migration Foundation and Pilot Session (3 months)

After deciding on a design, we focused on constructing the cloud infrastructure and relocating unnecessary tasks:

• Cloud Landing Zone established a secure, lawful cloud environment by utilizing the right networking, security measures, and governance.
• a thorough IAM architecture that combined role-based access control and multi-factor authentication.
• Pipeline for DevOps: Code and application releases are now easier thanks to automated continuous integration and delivery pipelines.
• Observability and Monitoring: Complete cloud-wide monitoring and alerting was put into place.
• By moving non-essential components (such the analytics platform and reporting services), the migration experiment aimed to test the plan and build team competency.

The employees at TechForward had a lot of new skills to pick up at this time. "There was definitely a learning curve," asserts Jennifer Thompson, the DevOps services lead. Since most of our team members lacked adequate cloud experience, we connected them with your cloud experts to speed up knowledge transfer. The sample transfers gave us more confidence, and we noticed trends that we could apply to the bigger workloads.

Phase 3: A four-month core application migration

After setting up the framework and applying the knowledge gained from the pilot migrations, we moved the main application:

• During database migration, the primary database is moved to a managed database service with less downtime.
• The program's core elements were rewritten to take advantage of cloud-native services and boost scalability.
• Global Distribution of Content: A global CDN was created to improve functionality for users from different nations.
• Automatic scaling The application tier auto-scaling was implemented to efficiently handle evolving requirements.
• recuperating from a disaster: Setting up and testing a comprehensive disaster recovery plan on a regular basis

This phase was challenging from a technical perspective, particularly with regard to database migration and maintaining application consistency during the transition. According to database architect David Wilson, "the database migration was the most nerve-wracking part." We could not afford for our gigabytes of client data to be lost or corrupted. Your approach allowed us to move forward with the least amount of disruption to our clients by combining logical replication with carefully thought-out cutover windows.

Continuous innovation and optimization are part of the fourth phase.

Following the completion of the significant transfer, we focused on optimizing the cloud environment and leveraging its innovative potential.

• By implementing automated cost management technologies and adhering to rightsizing guidelines, cost optimization was accomplished.
• Optimizing database configurations and application components to achieve optimal cloud performance is known as performance tuning.
• Enhancements in Security: Threat detection, encryption, and compliance monitoring are some of the sophisticated security techniques used.
• Making the Transition to Micro-Services: began progressively dividing large, uncontrollable components into more manageable, smaller microservices
• Data Analytics System: offered clients more sophisticated analytics options by utilizing cloud data services.

Effects and Results

According to TechForward, the cloud transfer's result has been revolutionary, fixing their present issues and positioning them for growth and innovation in the future:

The following qualitative advantages have resulted from the application in addition to these headline indicators:

• The average page load time for users from foreign countries has been reduced by 65%, which has improved the user experience.
• Scalability: Even when the platform handles peak loads that are five times higher than they were before the migration, performance is maintained.
• Development Agility: Innovation is encouraged when developers can provision environments in minutes rather than days.
• Security Posture: TechForward has passed enterprise security assessments and complied with SOC 2 because of their enhanced security capabilities.
• Recruiting New Customers: Improved performance and dependability have led to a 42% increase in enterprise customer acquisition.

"Our organization has undergone significant change as a result of the cloud migration. Firefighting and infrastructure maintenance are now subordinated to product innovation and customer value. Our dependability and performance have significantly increased, but perhaps more significantly, we have become more agile. We can now introduce new features in days rather than weeks, and we can scale and experiment more freely as our customer base grows. The way we compete and do business in the market has been drastically changed by this."

— Sarah Chen, CTO, TechForward

Takeaways

Several useful conclusions from the TechForward move can assist other companies launching cloud initiatives:

• Thorough planning, in-depth understanding of the current situation, and a thorough evaluation are necessary for a successful transition.
• A Step-by-Step Method Lowers Risk: When the shift is divided into manageable phases with clear success criteria, there is minimal disruption to business operations.
• Advantages of Refactoring Even while "lift and shift" is faster, carefully chosen restructuring has far greater advantages in terms of cost, scalability, and performance.
• The Development of Skills Is Essential: Building the internal team's cloud competences is essential for long-term success.
• After the first transfer, the biggest benefits come from ongoing innovation and development; cloud computing is a process rather than a destination.

Perhaps most importantly, the TechForward case study demonstrates that cloud migration is a business transformation that may drastically change an organization's capacity for innovation, operations, and customer value.