Seamless Cloud Migration With A Trusted, Strategic Technology Partner

When you operate a global supply chain for packaging and other non-merchandise items for some of the World’s Leading Luxury Brands, your reputation is linked to integrity, reliability, and excellence. 

Technology is critical in this client’s operation as every service, from the design and manufacturing to the logistics of delivering the product through partners, relies on it.    In fact, in the span of 2 decades of operations, the complexity of the process has increased drastically.  With over 50 servers of various sizes, operating systems, and middleware, along with the supporting system such as AD and firewalls, dedicated to running just the sales and logistic departments smoothly.

Aware has been honored to be this client’s trusted strategic technology partner since their early days when they were starting operations.   Over the years, Aware’s role has included managing the previous hardware replacement projects that traditionally have taken place at 5-to-10-year intervals to ensure no interruptions for the end users.   

However, by 2020 a hardware replacement project of this magnitude would require a significate investment and a minimum of one year of planning. The traditional project would include:

• creating a list of hardware,
• procurement,
• wiring and configuration,
• logistics,
• racking,
• software installation and data migration

This extended timeline would mean that by the time the new system would be ready for cut-over, the hardware would already be a year or two into its life span.

It was an ideal time to start mulling over the advantages of migrating to the cloud.  After much planning and discussion with the client, a decision was made to develop a new robust, and secure hybrid system.  This entailed moving the bulk of programs to a cloud platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS), connecting those systems with the other SaaS products the client uses on the cloud while leaving a few core programs on-premise.

Team Aware’s Role

Along with migrating 200+ applications to the new platform, the Aware team also assisted with updating each application to the most recent stable version.   Some of the manual-managed applications required re-platforming to AWS-managed solutions.   The re-platform work was vital in releasing the internal operations team from many routine and time-consuming tasks, such as renewal certificates and installations so that they could focus on more critical tasks.