A CIO of our client company was trying to move a datacenter from a co-location to a cloud provider.
Sounds simple enough, right?
You’re #CuriousAboutData, so read on!
There was a twist. The system wasn’t well documented and they were having a difficult time coming up with a migration plan. As he showed me a huge Visio diagram of dozens of servers, load balancers, firewalls, etc., I kept thinking: “It doesn’t have to be this complicated”.
When he was done explaining, I piped up: “We need to break this up to get anything done”.
“What do you mean?!” He didn’t expect that.
That’s when I explained BitWise’s “famous” divide and conquer approach.
You see, most digital systems can be divided into smaller parts that can be encapsulated. Those smaller units are much easier to inventory, configure and troubleshoot. In most cases, it becomes a trivial task.
So, the difficulty shifts from having to manage an enormous complexity to being able to create modular systems, which is (really) something that should have been a design goal to begin with.
In their case, it was fairly easy to separate things out. First, the network infrastructure, then authentication servers (AD), then database servers, and finally application groups one by one.
With this, suddenly their migration became more manageable. Each “migration group” could be tested and documented separately – and even in parallel if they wanted to. At the actual cut-over time, we would have a clear sequence with well-defined acceptance criteria, etc.
All this from just a tiny twist of a thought. This company knew without me telling them that their infrastructure could be subdivided. They also knew that smaller divisions are easier to test and migrate. But they couldn’t make that “leap of consciousness” to turn this information into useful knowledge.
I guess that’s where BitWise comes in.
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