Craigs owns, maintains, and manages their own on-premises infrastructure operating from a co-located datacentre. They have bespoke systems sitting on a highly customised network with an associated need to deal with multiple vendors. Their technology environment has evolved over a time of rapid business growth, and this has included adopting some SaaS tools via Azure and other cloud providers.

Craigs identified that a new foundation in the cloud would have a multitude of benefits. It would effectively provide opportunities to improve day to day operations for users (their employees), helping with financial analysis, research, wealth management, and strategies for performance gains. Craigs also identified being in the cloud would place them in a prime position to access the latest AI tools as they are released ongoing. Additionally, by moving quickly they could avoid application end-of-life risks, and the associated costs of remaining on-premises.

The Craigs transformation journey involves the replacement of several key systems, modernisation of 30+ applications, and the retirement of 26 applications. All up, this is planned to take place over 2 years, and involves over 200 servers and 84 applications being migrated to Azure.

With work currently underway, Craigs is on track to be fully in the cloud and providing customers with enhanced experiences and value by the end of 2024.

By using Dr Migrate in the initial instance, Craigs was able to ascertain with confidence when they could turn off services with their incumbent infrastructure provider, saving costs and minimising the potential for additional expenses caused by unpredictable delays.

Dr Migrate provided a complete picture for Craigs of their entire technology estate, helping them understand the migration workloads, and ascertain with confidence the cost implications and comparisons in moving from on-premises to Azure. This enabled Craigs to build their business case for transformation and what their transformation journey would entail, including from a change perspective, business perspective, cost perspective and execution perspective.

Craigs were also able to meet their financial reporting requirements and the CapEx and OpEx implications on the strength of the figures generated by Dr Migrate. This included the use of Dr Migrate’s Intel benchmarking engine to determine the most cost- and performance-effective cloud server resource allocation, in moving to Azure.

Further, and as an unexpected bonus – the initial costs forecasting provided by Dr Migrate allowed Craigs to confidently negotiate a three-year agreement with Microsoft based on their projected Azure consumption. This was possible due to the detailed projections based on the application treatments defined with Dr Migrate, and the associated resource allocation in Azure. This quantified knowledge also strengthened Craigs’ ability to negotiate additional funding support from Microsoft towards their transformation journey.

Ongoing, Dr Migrate will be used to plan the instate architecture for cloud adoption and will continue to be leveraged to review all applications and infrastructure as the migration unfolds.

To support both the migration and the plan to modernise apps in tandem, Craigs is using Bedrock to accelerate the build a modern Azure platform designed to scale and which is CAF aligned. Bedrock is compliant with cyber security requirements for FSIs.

Once their new Azure platform is built, Craigs will begin to modernise over 30 applications in the cloud.