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VISIBILITY OVER FULL TECH ESTATE PROVIDES CONFIDENCE IN MIGRATION
Craigs Investment Partners has rapidly grown to become one of New Zealand’s largest private investment firms. The company has ambitions for further growth, utilising technology to enhance security and create efficiencies in its business, continuously improving the personalised client service offering that has underpinned its success to date.
Craigs has embarked on a bold digital transformation journey across their entire technology estate to create scale and capacity for its continued growth. The aim is to be fully in the cloud by the end of 2024, including the modernisation of over 30+ applications which support the provisioning of customer services. The transformation will benefit Craigs’ clients, employees and the environment.
“The number one reason Craigs invested in Dr Migrate was visibility. We needed to gain a clear view over our technical estate, and to be able to present this not just to our technical team but at a management level as well. Being based in Power BI, our executives saw dashboards they were familiar with, and data and projections that were intuitive.”
CLIENT VISION
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.
OUTCOMES AT A GLANCE
OUR FEARLESS APPROACH
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.
“In developing our business case for the cloud, I needed accurate cost comparisons between remaining in the co-located datacentre and moving to an Azure tenancy. Dr Migrate and the Intel benchmarking engine automatically provided me with TCO, ROI and sustainability projections, but I took the time to validate the calculations myself. There was no material difference – Dr Migrate’s accuracy impressed me.”
LAB3 Solutions Used