DEDA

An Infrastructure Migration to MS Azure offered the flexibility needed.

Client: DEDA
Industry: Shipping
Services: Azure
Timeline: November 2021 - January 2022

Overview

DEDA was established in 2017 and is a subsidiary of the Public Gas Company (DEPA). DEDA owns, develops, operates, and supports the natural gas distribution networks of Greece, ensuring an uninterrupted energy supply. With a Development plan that includes the expansion of natural gas networks in 39 cities throughout Greece and the construction of 1,880 km of network in more than 50,000 connections, DEDA is a modern and dynamic company with needs that are constantly evolving.
DEDA engaged with BlueStream to support the migration of their workloads to the Cloud. BlueStream managed not only to transfer their data to the cloud but also to help them take advantage of all cloud-native technologies.

Business Challenges

DEDA was facing difficulties by the limited capabilities of their on-premises infrastructure and at the same time, the company wanted to avoid the huge costs that came with the one-off renewal of all relevant hardware. Their aim was to change their strategy by transferring their overall investment and operating costs from a Capex to an Opex model.

Provided they offered a dynamic management environment and also kept the investment costs of the transition low, DEDA comissioned BlueStream to support the transfer of its workloads to Azure, the Microsoft Cloud platform.

Technical Challenges

By migrating to Azure, Deda wanted to acquire improved scalability, eliminating the need for continuous hardware investments, maximum redundancy with workloads in diffrent regions and enhanced support by using Azure tools.

By moving to Azure and using its capabilities, we were able to:

Recreate an absolute image of the on-prem infrastructure to azure
Have almost Zero Downtime for all Applications
Create Availability Sets for Application Servers
Create Backup and Disaster Recovery for all Workloads

Client Requirements

The BlueStream Migration service designed to facilitate a fast transfer to Azure, offers an integrated strategy that allows its customers not just to move to the cloud but to transform to the cloud… meaning, to take full advantage of all those cloud-native technologies that really renew operations.

The IT leadership team has worked closely with business partners to understand what they want to achieve with this migration:

Improve Reliability. Ensure that Corporate data is never lost, and applications stay available despite server crashes, power outages, or natural disasters while to introduce better SLA and performance controls.
Address business growth. DEDA is growing, so there's pressure on the company's on-premises systems and infrastructure and require a to move as quickly as they need, but still be accountable for the cost of the resources they demand.

Features / Functionality

The migration was divided to 3 Phase:

Phase 1:

Included the installation of the connectivity components (Azure Vitrual Networks and Subnets, NSGs, Route Tables etc) between Azure and the Client Premises using Azure VPN Gateway feature, and then a lift and shift of client’s Applications Servers in Azure using Azure Migrate service. During the Migration, Availability Sets and Availability Zones were implemented so that the SLA of Application Servers reach the appropriate level based on the Business requirements. All the Servers of the client were re-sized based on the Requirements of each Application and that normalized the Performance Issues that the client had in the previous environment.

Phase 2:

Databases were migrated in IaaS model and resized based on the requirements of the workloads. DB Servers were put on Availability Zones based on the given SLA from the Business.

Phase 3:

Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery was enabled for the whole azure infrastructure providing a Data Loss/ Restore Mechanism to the client and a Recovery Plan to another Azure Region for the Business Continuity of the client’s workloads.

Concluding the migration project, we gave the client suggestions on how to increase the performance and the SLA of its infrastructure even more by using new technologies, ex. SQL Always On for the Database Workload and we introduced the Azure PaaS model which offers multiple benefits for both the IT and the Business. Till today, with the help of ours Support, DEDA has modernized some of their Applications by using Azure PaaS model in their Infrastructure.

Business Outcome

The transfer to the Cloud is a technological and organizational change that requires very careful handling and coordination. With only 24 hours down-time, the BlueStream team was able to move all DEDA workloads to the Microsoft Cloud and ensure the immediate operation of the services offered, avoiding the usual pitfalls often experienced by large enterprises in migrating to the cloud.

Taking advantage of the Azure capabilities, we achieved:

To deliver improved application resiliency through leveraging the Azure Cloud Platform.

To facilitate the operational self-sufficiency of our client by improving his organizational agility.

To enable the customer’s teams to focus on higher value work by leveraging many of the Azure managed infrastructure services.