Imagine fishing in a remote location in Alaska when a crisis occurs. You’re caught in the middle of a storm, so the chances of someone coming to your rescue are slim to none. Now you are faced with having to find a solution on your own because failure is not an option.
This mindset of “a hundred reasons to fail, but no excuses” is crucial to surviving our imaginary fishing scenario. It was also the driving force behind the State of Alaska’s rapid cloud migration effort.
The project was funded in July 2022 by Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, with the primary objective to reduce the risks associated with on-premise services. All executive branch servers were assessed, and everything that could technically migrate was moved with as minimal impact as possible to the application support teams.
In the first phase of their migration, the State of Alaska chose to migrate the servers in their Anchorage data centers since that’s where they had the majority of their inventory and where they wouldn’t have to deal with limited bandwidth challenges. During this phase, 65% of servers were migrated or shut down, 7% underwent standard migration, and 15% were pushed to the second phase due to compliance, contractual or technical prerequisites. All servers were migrated on schedule with minimal app disruption and within budget.
Deputy CIO for the State of Alaska, Niel Smith, joined us at VMware Explore Las Vegas to share the story of Alaska’s success and how other states navigating similar cloud migrations can implement lessons learned.
Reeling in success with the captain’s support
According to Niel, the secret ingredient to the state of Alaska’s successful migration was not the technical bits — it was the executive support.
Every organization wants to take on more projects than their resources allow. That’s why it’s essential to have an effective leader who can determine strategic priority, as lack of executive support is one of the primary reasons for project failures.
“If somebody says, ‘We don’t have enough resources,’ I will challenge you. If you had nothing else to do and you took all of your people and worked on one thing, like COVID taught us, you have hundreds of resources. It’s a matter of setting priority,” Niel said.
In order to actually achieve the strategic goal, leaders need to allow their teams to say no to other projects so they can stay focused on the biggest priority. In this case, the governor sent a memo to senior state leadership saying that participation was not optional. A second memo followed, stating no more on-premise IT hardware would be purchased in the State of Alaska. That kind of leadership and focus lead to high participation rates.
Casting away latency concerns
Something that frequently comes up with migrations is latency concerns. While a valid concern, it shouldn’t be an issue with the right cloud migration approach.
The distance between Anchorage, Alaska, and the Azure server in western California is a whopping 2,400 miles. Despite the distance, they can send data in less than 100 milliseconds from their primary data center to a primary cloud location. Simply put, the data transfers are fast, and the system is working well.
“Let me tell you, there are people in Alaska who think that we are so big and so remote and so special that we defy the laws of physics and the speed of light,” Niel said.
Through trial and error, one thing Niel learned is not to put a web server in the cloud and leave the database on-premise. A person sitting on-premise with a workstation accessing the front-end web server is no different than someone sitting on their tablet, browsing a web page that’s hosted halfway around the world. 99% of the time, it’s going to work.
Hook, line, and partner: Avoiding impact together
Avoiding impact to applications during migration is challenging, but that’s where working with a partner like VMware can help.
The Azure VMware solution allows IT teams to accelerate cloud migration by running VMware infrastructure software as a native Azure service on bare-metal hosts in Azure data centers. It allows users to maintain operational consistency of existing VMware investments while leveraging the scale and performance of Azure.
For this project, Niel decided to stand up VMware in their Azure data center because of its ability to stretch subnets between locations without breaking sessions. And in an effort to save time, Niel’s team chose their partner before the money was even available to them. This saved them months of delay.
Navigational insights
As with any successful project, Niel and his team walked away with several key learnings:
Implement a communications plan
Something that surprised Niel was the need for a solid communications plan. It turned out that the hardest part wasn’t the tech, it was getting project buy-in. Niel learned very quickly that having the governor’s mandate did not mean that everybody was going to be onboard with the plan. FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) occurs every time a new project kicks off, and that can stop a project just as fast as a broken circuit. Make sure you are thinking through an appropriate communications plan to get all of your key players and stakeholders onboard, try to ease their concerns, and be ready to answer their anticipated questions.
Compliance checklist
Compliance is essential and should never be treated as an afterthought. Trying to figure out the compliance requirements as you go will slow down the migration process. To ensure a speedy migration, create a checklist ahead of time. What do you need to do to be compliant with the IRS? HIPPA? Having a list from the start will keep things running smoothly.
Immutable backups
An unplanned business continuity benefit of moving to the cloud was the availability of immutable storage backup solutions. Research shows that people come into your network when it’s compromised and are in there approximately six months before your payload gets triggered. So, it’s good to have immutable backup copies for at least six or more months. It may cost more, but it’s going to be worth it for critical public service applications.
Customer-managed encryption keys
To meet compliance requirements in cloud facilities, use customer-managed encryption keys to isolate data from the cloud service provider’s infrastructure for more security. These keys encrypt the storage at rest and encrypt the application in transit. So it doesn’t matter where those applications are sitting — if you are in the data center supporting it, to you everything is encrypted. Both the IRS and the FBI are already leaning down that road for customer-managed keys.
Not only does cloud migration modernize technology, but employees learn a lot in the process. Once you’ve crossed over the hurdle of migrating to the cloud, you’ll have greater visibility into your environment, and future modernization will only become easier down the road. Simply put, the hard work is done.
Interested in learning more? Watch the full on-demand session recording from VMware Explore Las Vegas here.
VMware Industry Solutions
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