By Jamie Smith, Chief Information Officer
You don’t usually call something a success when no one notices what you’ve done. But in the IT world, if nothing “happens,” that’s a good thing. So when your team moves a huge legacy application with decades worth of data to its new home in the Cloud and no one outside of IT knows, that’s a victory. It’s what I mean when I say the best migrations are boring. University of Phoenix, I’m happy to say, recently had a very boring migration.
Like many other organizations, we are making the inevitable shift to modernize aging technology infrastructures. This can be daunting for any business, but can seem especially so for those with large amounts of data. For two years, we’ve been quietly undertaking a massive virtualization and migration project. The end result is a streamlined department on target to reduce its overhead by 40 percent over the next three years.
We know the changes in IT will continue coming at us at a rapid pace, so we are also poised to stay on the cutting edge. With that in mind, here are some tips for businesses small and large as you consider your organization’s own migration plan:
Identify your overall goal based on your needs
The way you go about your migration plan will ultimately depend on timeline, and that can be different depending on the amount of data, the health of your existing setup, resources and the reasons why you are migrating in the first place. When we started this journey, we knew our ultimate destination was being full cloud native, and we had to find a cost-effective way to get there. Most important, though, was our “why.” Typically, 97 percent of our students are virtual, and now post-COVID, this number is 100 percent. Because all of our learning is hosted in a digital environment, the UOPX digital platform is the college experience for our students. A glitch in making the move could impact our students’ learning and our business operations. So we determined that not doing it wasn’t an option.
Look at your existing infrastructure
Many businesses have built up their systems over time to store massive amounts of data and ensure safe backup, and these systems still function just as they’re supposed to even without updates. The decision needs to be made as to how long you want to rely on what you’ve got or to move forward with change, and at what pace. The fact that you can have the power on and backups running for years straight is impressive, but it doesn’t negate the need for an update. As a leading online education provider in higher ed, we had amassed a huge amount of data with a massive amount of infrastructure. It was functional, but it was aging. In terms of Gartner’s Run, Grow, Transform Model, it was time to stop focusing on keeping things running and start transformation of the entire IT department.
Highlight the extra benefits
It’s possible that the migration may actually lead to cost savings, which is an overall benefit to your business. For instance, think about the sheer amount of energy your existing systems may be using and how that translates to dollars and cents.
Without getting too deep in the technical jargon, when I first started at UOPX, we had thousands of physical and virtual servers operating hundreds of applications, with new and old hardware combined, clusters of firewalls and 10 different router cores. That’s a lot of technology to keep cool in one of the hottest cities in the country. Our electric bill for the data center alone was very high. So the goal was to drive down costs while delivering more.
Let the results speak for themselves
Projects done in phases are great in that you can see the outcomes to help build momentum for the forthcoming phases. After our first successful migration, our electric bill shrank. The enthusiasm snowballed with every server we decommissioned. The early savings also helped smooth out the bump in costs that you typically see when you implement any new system. We were able to fully absorb this and not ask for new investment dollars outside of our budget.
Don’t stall out with analysis paralysis
Planning is important, but overthinking can get in the way of progress. When you know that you have to accomplish a migration in a certain timeframe or risk stalling or even foregoing a shift to an industry standard, you need to remind those involved that standing still may actually mean a step back in regards to security.
We approached our initiative as a natural part of our evolution and acknowledged that it would be a lot of work. We knew we had a hard date of August 2020 to renew the data center lease. So that became our focus, and we moved forward.
Make it meaningful to your organization
If you frame your project as part of a bigger picture initiative—whatever that means for your business—and tie the progress to a goal or objective that fulfills your organizational mission, it will make it meaningful to everyone, not just your team.
At UOPX, disruption is in our DNA. We are student-centric in all aspects, even when it comes to IT, and throughout this process we considered the benefits to the students all along the way. This process allowed us to make the necessary changes to ensure we are on the cutting edge when it comes to data storage in ways that impact our customer base. Your customers deserve the same.
Jamie Smith has been the CIO at University of Phoenix since 2018. Over the past two years he has restructured the IT department, streamlining its infrastructure and operations.