Charles Taylor provides a growing range of insurance services, claims and technology solutions across the global insurance market. With an unmatched depth of specialist expertise, from loss adjusters to forensic accountants, Charles Taylor help the global insurance market to address its challenges. Through a trusted partnership model, Charles Taylor builds long-term, personal relationships with clients based on trust and cooperation. With powerful technology to help clients improve their customers’ experience from start to finish. As with many established enterprises, overcoming legacy technologies and technical debt is a key gate to growth. Charles Taylor’s strategy in this space centred around a datacentre wide consolidation to AWS.
The Challenge
With the strategy set, and AWS destination decided, the core challenges emerged – the time and skills available from existing resources to complete the migration / consolidation program to AWS inline with the agreed datacentre exit timeline.
Early conversations with AWS directly helped Charles Taylor shape the need for an AWS partner to lead the migration. This immediately led to work with other AWS partners to complete a level of existing environment discovery in preparation for planning the migration. However, various partner challenges arose and Charles Taylor found themselves in a tussle of partner evaluations.
At this point, Softcat were referred in by AWS and began to unpick and plan the migration. But as a complex migration you are balancing; moving hundreds of assets, modernizing some systems as you go, aligning dependencies against critical path deadlines, and managing changes in scope. This balance unfortunately took too much time during the early engagement and a new challenge emerged – the volume of work to complete in the time remaining.
“Our strategy was clear, but getting to the destination was off to immediate bumpy start with mixed skill sets from the early AWS partners we spoke to. Softcat eventually emerged as the lead partner but by this point we had some hurdles to overcome against datacentre exit deadlines that could not move. The key to getting over these hurdles, as with most, is communication (between and within our respective organisations) and planning. We dug deep as a combined team, added additional layers of resource, managed the scope creep and the light at the end of the tunnel began to shine through” David West, Chief Technology Officer, Charles Taylor.
Key facts
- 9/10 Employees recommend Charles Taylor as a great place to work
- ~4000 Experts based around the globe
- Present in 6 continents
The Solution
For a program of this complexity, a tri-party (AWS, Charles Taylor and Softcat) approach is the only way to ensure success, and following an initial kick off the team commenced with reviewing the previous results of discovery and planning the design and migration.
To ensure adherence to the strict datacentre exit timeline, a rehost / life & shift migration approach was agreed as the most efficient approach, with modernization to occur post migration. End to end migration planning (scope, roles & responsibilities, cutover plan, rollback plan, testing & acceptance plan and dependencies) formed a crucial part of the ongoing program management. This baseline approach included the design and full integration of a new AWS environment / landing zone into the wider Charles Taylor enterprise IT estate, factoring the necessary security, compliance, disaster recovery and architectural requirements of Charles Taylor.
However, initial design reviews identified several areas of the Charles Taylor estate that simply could not conform to this approach, with a key example being the legacy approach to virtual desktop infrastructure. Instead exceptions to the migration baseline were agreed, and specifically in this case, the adoption of modernized / replacement solution based on Amazon WorkSpaces was agreed. Added complexity further came in the testing of licensing and applications required to validate this new solution which the joint team moved quickly to achieve including involvement from AWS product experts. This followed by the time critical sourcing of replacement devices (to refresh the aging existing hardware and ensuring Amazon WorkSpace compatibility), including overcoming challenges in shipping logistics with Softcat on-hand to leverage it’s market leading approach to pre-configuring devices centrally and shipping directly to office and end user locations.
As the program ramped up, additional Softcat resource was layered in to address challenges around workstream execution and ensure the end goal could be realized. AWS reviews were completed to sign-off key stages and provide the reassurance for Charles Taylor as to the readiness pre final migration cutover. The culmination was various cutover milestones executed over the course of working days, evenings and weekends over a period of many weeks.
“This was a complex migration program, with critical dates to achieve, but fuelled by great collaboration between the Charles Taylor, AWS and Softcat teams. Communication and attitude were the keys to overcoming to obstacles we faced, with the end result delivering the strategy which Charles Taylor had set out.” Mark Forster, Chief Technology Officer, Softcat.
Highlights
- 6-month datacentre consolidation to AWS program of works.
- Migration of all infrastructure and applications to AWS
- Modernisation of virtual desktop infrastructure solution to Amazon WorkSpaces.
The Benefits
The key results are:
- Completely refreshed technology and infrastructure estate, leveraging AWS first services.
- The completion of a 6-month datacentre consolidation to AWS on-time.
- Modernised approach to the delivery of virtual desktop infrastructure supported by cloud native Amazon WorkSpaces.
- Renewed opportunities for modernisation leveraging turn-key AWS services
“When the program entered its most difficult phases, our collective team showed true determine to achieve the end result. Softcat adapted and helped us overcome the challenges, which are the attributes we need from a partner, with the end result providing all the reward for the hard work, as our technology provisions enters a new phase of growth to support our business” David West, Chief Technology Officer, Charles Taylor.