ANZ acquired a leading Australian insurance provider, which had an outsourced data center containing hundreds of servers. Consolidating the insurance provider's data center into one of the bank’s centralized data centers was a primary measure of success for the acquisition.
The challenge
The insurance data center provided core functionality for the business: hosting databases, directory services, mail, and other applications. At stake were critical business functions supporting policy management, pricing, quoting, workflows, document and correspondence generation, payments and general ledger capabilities. With all these critical applications and functions requiring the least amount of customer facing downtime, the migration had to occur over a weekend with absolute assurance everything would go flawlessly.
The solution
The team needed to document the current environmental state of existing applications and servers. Like most organizations, this critical information was not centralized or even fully documented. Additionally, they needed comprehensive automated testing to verify the migration’s success. UpGuard captures the current state of any environment and transforms the configurations into executable documentation. The human-readable tests are created through a UI, allowing large teams to start using UpGuard immediately—a necessity for time sensitive projects like the data center migration.
The results
99.975% reduction in time to validate data center migration
The estimated time for manual testing was four hours per server. That scope was completely unacceptable, as testing would take more time than the migration itself. Dry runs with UpGuard had reduced that by 99.975% to an allocation of four hours total for all servers during the Go-Live weekend.
1280x faster testing, enabling ANZ team to focus on business continuity through the migration
In defiance of Murphy’s Law, testing with UpGuard during the migration only required 30 minutes—one eighth the estimated time and 1,280 times faster than manual testing. Being able to gain a comprehensive view of all servers and applications in only half an hour regained 3.5 hours, enabling the team to focus on other critical issues and complete the migration with no downtime for business functions.