Telent

‘We increased efficiency and reduced hosting costs with SoftwareOne and Azure’

Telent designs, builds, and manages some of the United Kingdom’s most critical digital infrastructure for customers such as the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, ambulance and fire rescue services throughout the UK and Ireland, and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency which recently contracted it to build a network connecting 165 remote radio sites along 11,000 miles of UK coastline.

For some of its customers, Telent hosts and supports workloads on a Public Services Network-certified private cloud solution. “We ran this on two Equinix data centers which, because of the inflexible nature of on-premise solution, we had vastly over-provisioned,” says Luan Hughes, Chief Information Officer at Telent. “We were paying for power that we were not using, wasting a lot of money.”

In early 2023, Telent decided to exit these data centers and migrate its Cloud Services arm to Azure. “We were on a tight timeline because our contract with Equinix came up for renewal at the end of November, and the transition had to be faultless. There could be no downtime because what our customers do affects the lives and safety of UK citizens.”

The project for such a complex, multi-tenanted migration to Azure was put out to tender. “There were a few other contenders,” says Sandeep Loi, Head of Cloud Engineering at Telent, “and we held the usual meetings and watched the usual presentations, but it was pretty obvious that SoftwareOne would emerge as the winner.”

Telent had not previously used Microsoft project funding via its Azure Migrate and Modernization program (AMM), and this was the icing on the cake of SoftwareOne’s successful pitch.

“But by the time everything was onboarded, and all the red tape had been done, we were left with barely five months to migrate our platform,” Sandeep says. “If this was ever a concern, I need not have worried because SoftwareOne was fully on board with us and moved things along very rapidly; I was surprised by just how fast it all gathered pace.”

Expanding capabilities and customer impact through cloud transition

The design of the migration and buy-in from Telent’s customers was a crucial phase of the project but the Cloud Adoption Framework workshops were completed in just a month. In July 23, the first machine was migrated to Azure. The Telent Cloud Services business case was for a migration of 217 machines but these were consolidated to 145, with the entire process completed exactly two months later in September.

“This left us plenty of time to smoothly exit our Equinix servers and contract – without a hitch, without downtime, without our Telent Cloud Service customers being aware of it.”

The lack of friction and the timely delivery of the project were all the more remarkable given the complexity of the migration. “This wasn’t a standard migration of a single entity going from A to B,” says Sandeep, “or of one customer getting its own tenant in Azure, as we migrated them individually, one after another. No, this was a multi-tenanted migration to a shared infrastructure. This gives you economies of scale, but it also makes the job much harder.”

“SoftwareOne always went the extra mile. Many of our workloads couldn’t be moved during the day, and a lot had to be done outside of working hours. That was never a problem; SoftwareOne was always happy to help. And the consultants supported us throughout the process.”

Strategic migration to Azure: Enhancing operations and improving efficiency

The Azure migration achieved its objectives – and more. Telent Cloud Services was running a massive VMware platform, which it no longer needs, leading to considerable savings. “Also, in terms of Windows, servers, and SQL, we had separate agreements for that with our old partner. We’re now just using essentially the ones provided in Azure.”

These are the visible benefits of the migration.

“What is just as game-changing for us is that it has freed up our engineers,” Sandeep explains. “Azure gives my engineers more time to do what they should be doing, and not running around replacing hard disks and fixing vulnerabilities in hardware. What is more, if we had stayed on that platform, most of the kit was coming to end of life. It would have required a significant investment to uplift the hardware to the next level.”

Telent engineers now have the bandwidth for additional projects, and because they work in Azure, the range of what they can do has been greatly extended.

“It's opened up a world of opportunities,” says Sandeep. “We’re getting a lot of interest on stuff we wouldn't have normally been able to provide. One of our customers, a UK transport infrastructure group, has tons of SQL servers on-premise, and needs a Microsoft Power BI service to which to point that data, visualize it, analyze it, generate reports, and so on. Previously, we wouldn't have been able to offer any of that because we weren’t in Azure. But the migration has given us more capabilities and we’ve been approached by our transport division to provide a proof of concept.

“For another customer, we are doing a proof of concept for an IoT hub in Azure – again, that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.”

Telent is happy; its customers are happy.

“The next thing we are looking at, is to get some of our customers to commit to reserved instances for virtual machines. A three-year price fix has the potential to bring costs right down. At the moment, we are on a pay-as-you-go model, but we’ve been looking at consumption and the longevity of customer contracts to see if they could benefit from that. So far, we have identified two or three,” says Luan.

Another area she is keen to explore further is SoftwareOne’s Cloud Economics service. “SoftwareOne has provided us with a FinOps platform reporting on Azure so we can visualize usage. It’s early days with this but we think Cloud Economics will enable us to optimize costs even further.”