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With over 5000 employees GVB takes care of public transport for almost 1 million travellers a day in the city of Amsterdam. The continuous delivery of their services calls for a highly available, secure and stable IT environment. Having a cloud first policy GVB is working on a large migration of the on-premises IT environment to Microsoft Azure, to ensure they can keep delivering their services, built on a modern IT infrastructure. We helped design and implement a variety of cloud solutions to build a solid base in Azure for the applications we helped migrate to.
When starting the project we noticed that there was very limited knowledge of cloud solutions in technical terms, as well as organizational terms. Next to that many were reluctant to move to the cloud. A cloud environment challenges an organization and their people to have a new view on and new approach to an IT environment and its organization. Part of making GVB cloud ready was teaching the engineers more about how to benefit the new possibilities the cloud brings and how to make optimal use of the capabilities. Next to that there was an organizational challenge to move from an operational role to a directing role.
Legacy hardware and the choice to not invest in new hardware contributed to the decision GVB made to make a move to the Azure cloud platform. We helped GVB making the translation from a traditional on-premises IT environment to a cloud environment.
Because of the limited timeframe we made distinction between end-state solutions and lift & shift solutions. For each seperate application and solution was decided where to migrate it to. Factors taken into consideration for these decisions were complexity and lifecycle.
Meeting the deadline of only 1,5 years to complete the entire migration of infrastructure and applications, whilst finding solutions for the complex regulatory and privacy related issues of the project. At the same time engaging the organization in a new way of thinking and working and managing a diversity of stakeholders with different interests.
The platform consists of a combination of cloud solutions to create a hybrid IT environment for a variety of applications that are either targeted to clients of GVB or support the business continuity.
I’ve enabled one of our clients to transform from a traditional datacenter hosted application landscape to Azure Service Fabric. From the business case, the high level design, infrastructure as code pipeline to the actual application transition I’ve been the frontrunner.
I like to play a leading-role in the “cloud team” at the client, helping to make the cloud journey a success using our deep knowledge, experience and best-practices of AWS.
