Construction Industry Training Board (CITB) is the Sector Skills Council and Industry Training Board for the construction industry in England, Scotland and Wales. CITB works with employers and trade organisations to help them improve skills, increase their competitive edge and respond to the many challenges employers face.
Introduction
CITB has several critical applications which its members across the country use on a daily basis. The use of these applications allows for members to perform key activities such as booking courses, preparing for tests and even checking membership cards are valid, all are important aspects to ensuring the industry continues to function and thrive.
16 applications, the majority of which were developed in-house, were identified to be migrated from the legacy environment to Microsoft Azure in a phased approach, with minimal disruption to business as usual activities. Safeguarding the availability of these chosen applications was a major requirement of CITB.
Industry:
Manufacturing
Country:
United Kingdom
Number of users:
1,500
The challenge
Time
was of the essence with this programme of work as the incumbent legacy hosting
contract was terminating imminently, and with no possibility of
extending this period. It was necessary to undertake all due diligence, define
the Cloud architecture, perform upgrades to all servers and undertake the
migration of each application within the fixed deadline.
Compounding these elements, there were several suppliers to work with and rigorous testing of each application prior and post migration to ensure user's experienced a seamless and successful service on the Azure platform.
Our solution
CoreAzure
divided the implementation into two stages. The first was a proof of concept
which tested and evaluated the Azure platform in the context of CITB
requirements. The second was a phased migration approach of the remaining 15 applications.
The commitment, experience and deep knowledge of the CoreAzure team meant that all migration activities were undertaken and completed within the required timeframe. Project documentation and knowledge transfer activities to CITB members of staff were all undertaken throughout the duration of the project alongside the migration.
Looking to the future, and because of the successful nature of this engagement, CITB have successfully formed their Public Cloud platform, and now need to ensure that they continue to leverage the fresh opportunities available to them.