Peraton consolidates data centers and migrates to AWS

The rapidly changing IT landscape dictates the need to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction, but companies face a number of challenges when creating and maintaining a company’s IT infrastructure. Using cloud technology helps alleviate the burden of undifferentiated work and maintenance compared to keeping environments on premises.

By migrating to the cloud, customers are able to move away from having to buy, own, and maintain physical data centers and servers. They are able to use the benefits of the cloud, like being able to innovate and build faster, increased elasticity of workloads, and reduced costs with the pay-only-for-what-you-use model.

Peraton is a mission capability integrator and delivers enterprise IT around the world. They are also an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services Partner with competencies in government, DevOps, and migration. Peraton’s IT infrastructure and technology strategy are designed to support the delivery of mission-critical services and solutions to its customers at a global scale.

In this post, we explore how Peraton used AWS to migrate and build out a virtual data center in AWS GovCloud (US) Regions within a six-month time frame with an advanced and secure end-state architecture.

Reducing cost through consolidation

After a series of merger and acquisition activities, Peraton had multiple data centers with leases that were ending by the end of 2022. Having already been integrated with AWS, Peraton found AWS suited their needs with greater agility for cloud migration, the lowest cost per gigabyte for the performance, and ease of management (operational efficiency). The challenge was not only in the timeline but also in that these data centers were from once disparate companies, which made it difficult to manage or move at scale.

Despite the challenges and complexity, leadership sponsored the initiative with a focus on cost savings. They were looking to reduce their capital expense investment and have greater control over their operational expense outlay. On the business side, financial planning shifted from managing long-term contracts to building around a pay-as-you-go financial model.

The timeline dictated strong organization, both in execution and planning. Following AWS guidance for accelerating cloud adoption, Peraton identified an executive sponsor in their chief information officer (CIO) at the time and put together the team that would actually execute the migration. Then, they got to work assessing what was needed.

Migration effort underway

As part of the migration strategy, Peraton worked with AWS to assess their starting point across the environment. This initial migration readiness assessment included going through all candidate workloads, such as servers that were over-provisioned, and designing actionable mobilization plans. By taking time to perform this assessment, they could identify servers ready to be retired, both saving time and reducing the workload for the migration.

AWS led training sessions and workshops to fill in any questions or challenges that came up. They discussed tools and software available for workload or data center migrations, showcased Windows offerings and integration patterns with existing Windows infrastructure, and explored cloud-centric security designs, approaches, and frameworks.

AWS Professional Services (ProServe) was brought on to work side by side with Peraton teams to create an easy structure for the migration order. Applications were tiered to decide whether to migrate as-is, transfer to a different platform, or modernize to a more cloud-centric architecture. This allowed for databases to be moved first and then progressively more complex workloads.

Once these assessments and financial projections were made, a migration landing zone and pipeline were built. This created a stable and repeatable process for moving applications and made testing post-migration simpler. In just six months, more than 800 terabytes (TB) and 150-plus servers were successfully migrated.

Migration outcomes

Since migrating to the AWS Cloud, Peraton’s IT infrastructure costs have decreased by 17 percent while increasing performance. More than 100 servers were retired, and Peraton was able to see significant cost savings.

Throughout the effort, Peraton documented and built training around all migration phases. The lessons learned during this migration not only helped the migration pace accelerate as it progressed but also built Peraton into a migration partner for other AWS customers.

Peraton continues to invest in the latest technologies and best practices that ensure that its systems and infrastructure are reliable, secure, and stable while staying cost-effective. Peraton is also investing in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to automate tasks and improve the efficiency of its internal operations.

If you have questions or want help with your migration, reach out to Peraton or talk with an AWS ProServe representative.