Moving Lighthouse Group's 350 servers to Microsoft Azure

The challenge

Lighthouse Group, a financial services organisation, ran its applications and data on 350 on-premises servers. It wanted to move this estate to Microsoft Azure, and to use the move as an opportunity to modernise workloads where that made sense.

• A large estate: 350 servers to assess, plan and move
• As a financial services organisation, security, resilience and compliance had to be maintained throughout
• Business services needed to keep running while the migration took place
• Some workloads would benefit more from modernisation than from a straight move

Our approach

1. 1
   Assess and plan

   We assessed the server estate, its applications and their dependencies, and grouped workloads into a prioritised migration plan.

2. 2
   Prepare the Azure foundation

   We prepared the Azure environment with the identity, networking, security and governance controls a regulated financial organisation needs.

3. 3
   Migrate in planned stages

   We moved the 350 servers to Azure in planned stages, testing each stage before moving on to the next.

4. 4
   Modernise selected workloads

   Where it added value, we moved workloads onto Azure PaaS services instead of running them on virtual machines.

The results

• Lighthouse Group's server estate now runs on Microsoft Azure rather than on-premises infrastructure
• Selected workloads were modernised onto Azure PaaS services, so there are fewer servers for the team to manage