Seizing an innovative opportunity: Boosting sustainability through Cloud Migration

REGION

United Arab Emirates

COMPANY TYPE

Public Sector

INDUSTRY

Environmental Services

CLOUD SOLUTION

March 8, 2024
9:28 am

The cloud migration was a critical milestone for Tadweer, as one of a few local government entities to successfully migrate to a cloud-based infrastructure ... this move reduced Tadweer’s energy consumption, lowered its carbon emissions, and utilized its resources in the most efficient way which aligns with its sustainability goals and plans to increase their ESG score.

THE CUSTOMER

Tadweer Group is a sustainable waste champion and the sole custodian for managing waste in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. The organisation is revolutionising recycling processes and unlocking the value of waste by harnessing advanced technology – promoting a circular economy internationally.

The organisation has developed an integrated infrastructure to extract value from waste by diverting from landfills – which contributes to many of UAE’s national sustainability ambitions such as Energy Strategy 2050, Net zero 2050 and National Digital Government Strategy 2025.

THE CHALLENGE

During the transition to a new HQ, the opportunity arose to boost sustainability by renewing Tadweer’s technology environment. This included a swift migration to the cloud within a tight timeframe to migrate a complex technology estate containing critical infrastructure.

Faced with an HQ change, Tadweer had one of two choices. First, moving the physical equipment of the on-premises technology estate to another office – with an associated environmental impact of the move, including a significant increase of energy consumption and carbon footprint. However, this would result in continuing to rely on outdated and under-optimized on-premises technology, impacting Tadweer’s sustainability and ESG goals.

Another option was to harness the opportunity of changing offices to also shift the technology estate to the cloud while decommissioning the legacy of the on-premises equipment. This would simplify the physical move, while simultaneously tapping into the sustainability benefits of a cloud-hosted technology environment.

Another key challenge was that Tadweer Group was operating roughly 75 corporate servers running over 45 applications. The group also relied on a variety of vendors and the need to install additional equipment for core corporate IT needs, all of which were required for the success of the migration. This type of migration project would typically require six months to complete.

THE SOLUTION

Tadweer decided to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud needs, but still needed to find a partner who could execute a complex move within only two months.

Tadweer chose Bespin Global – an AWS Premier partner – to migrate its workloads to AWS at a record pace. Rapid assessment was the first step. AWS assessed Tadweer’s current workload one month before the migration date, providing the organisation with a comprehensive design for the target AWS infrastructure as well as a detailed migration plan.

To help with the assessment, Bespin Global installed the Cloudamize tool which gathers utilization data from on-prem servers. Running the tool for 15 days was enough to provide the necessary reporting to configure rightsized AWS instances based on maximum measured server utilization, alongside the server and application dependencies needed to construct migration groups.

Bespin also held meetings with Tadweer’s internal IT teams, application owners, and application vendors to ensure alignment throughout the migration. In the remaining 15 days before the migration, the Bespin team built a detailed migration plan and constructed a scalable and secure multi-account AWS landing zone.

To perform the migration itself, Bespin used an AWS native tool called AWS Application Migration Service (MGN), which minimizes time-intensive, error-prone manual processes by automating the conversion of source servers to run natively on AWS.

MGN was installed on source servers from the start to begin the data replication process as soon as possible. Initial data replication from the source servers to AWS were completed shortly before the first migration wave, with subsequent syncs involving only changed data blocks.

THE EXECUTION

The migration was performed in four waves and Bespin Global finished the migration within 8 weeks, with minimum downtime. Tadweer continued to rely on business-critical applications throughout, which meant tight cutovers. For example, one migration wave had a cutover time of less than 4 hours.

After each migration wave, Tadweer’s teams thoroughly evaluated how the migration wave was completed. The end state of the migration included

Amazon EC2: 75 servers on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a scalable computing service designed for handling high workloads and providing resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
Amazon EBS: terabytes of data on Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a high-performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon EC2 for both throughput and transaction-intensive workloads at any scale.

As a result, Tadweer now enjoys the benefits of running workloads in the AWS cloud in terms of cost savings, operational resilience, business agility, and staff productivity. They also take advantage of cutting-edge cloud cybersecurity tools to protect their workloads against any malevolent actors. As a benefit to the migration process, Bespin also added the following security services.

AWS Config: to monitor and manage the configurations and relationships of AWS resources ensuring compliance and best practices. AWS Config facilitates centralised logging by directing config logs from a dedicated S3 Bucket.
AWS SecurityHub: for monitoring the security posture of Tadweer’s AWS environment, offering a unified view that aligns with industry standards and best practices.
AWS Secrets Manager: a critical service for managing sensitive information such as database credentials, API keys, and other secrets. It provides a secure hub where these secrets can be stored, accessed, and managed – including robust audit abilities.
Amazon GuardDuty: for continuous monitoring and threat detection in Tadweer’s AWS environment. It uses machine learning and various data sources, like VPC flow logs and CloudTrail, to identify and alert users of potential security threats.

Bespin also implemented AWS Systems Manager to configure centralised management for AWS resources and applications. As a result of the Systems Manager, we can automate tasks such as patching, tracking system inventory, and more.

RESULTS & BENEFITS

The intensive planning cooperation between Bespin and Tadweer Group successfully mitigated the risk of condensing the migration of a large technology estate into a two-month timeframe. The challenge was overcome through robust communication and meticulous scheduling, ensuring alignment with the accelerated timeline.

Furthermore, rightsizing for AWS was completed from the outset – careful use of AWS tools enabled Bespin to set up Tadweer Group with an AWS tenant that was a perfect fit, with zero wastage.

The cloud migration was a critical milestone for Tadweer, as one of a few local government entities to successfully migrate to a cloud-based infrastructure, showcasing its forward-leaning mindset and pioneering approach to digital transformation within the waste sector. The waste management entity also successfully achieved these results with sustainability as a priority. As a result of the cloud transition, Tadweer can now reflect its sustainability efforts across internal operations. This move reduced Tadweer’s energy consumption, lowered its carbon emissions, and utilized its resources in the most efficient way which aligns with its sustainability goals and plans to increase their ESG score. With the right-sized IT, Tadweer uses minimal energy for its information technology needs whilst also reducing the physical impact and waste in the workplace.

About Bespin Global, an e& enterprise company:

An AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and AWS Managed Service Partner, BESPIN GLOBAL MEA (Middle East and Africa) is a leading provider of automated cloud solutions and consulting services, including cloud adoption, strategy, migration, implementation, Managed Services, DevOps, FinOps and Data & Analytics. Bespin is positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, as well as a “Visionary” in Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant for IT Transformation Services.

In late 2022, Bespin Global MEA and e& enterprise formed a joint venture with the aim to assist enterprises in their digital transformation journey and eventually become the largest pure-play public cloud-managed and professional services provider in the Middle East, Turkey, Africa, and Pakistan.

Bespin’s cloud FinOps management platform, OpsNow offers an automated end-to-end solution for customers to effectively manage cloud assets and costs, optimize cloud expenses, and automate the implementation of cloud governance policies across multi-cloud environments.

Address: The Offices 4, #138-139, One Central, Dubai World Trade Center (DWTC)
Telephone: 800 BESPIN (237746)
P.O. Box: 340729