Cloud Migration & Application Remediation

An incumbent modernisation vendor had struggled to migrate a small number of residual legacy applications, spanning outdated platforms including MS Access, VB3, NT Server and SQL Server, to Azure, with vendor support due to cease and costs becoming unsustainable within a 15-month window. Previous remediation attempts had failed and the full scope of exposure was not fully understood. Existing staff lacked cloud, application development and agile delivery experience, and highly sensitive data required all off-premise work to happen in an audited ‘clean room’, with no DevOps monitoring in place.

We ran a 2-month top-down and bottom-up assessment to map true exposure, using automated discovery (‘sniffer’) processes across the technology landscape, revealing 60 corporate and market-facing applications with 180 points of end-of-life exposure, far beyond the client’s original understanding of the problem. We outlined a Strategy, Roadmap and Plan aligning Technology, Operations, Market teams and external vendors, then assembled two near-shore teams in audited clean rooms to execute the remediation using Agile Scrum with 2-week sprints and transparent Azure DevOps reporting, alongside extensive training to hand over the upgraded stack.

All 60 applications remediated within 15 months and in budget, using a standardised ‘Rehost, Replatform, Retire, Re-architect’ strategy. Applications too fragile to rehost or replatform were fully re-engineered, tested and documented. In-house teams were upskilled in cloud, modern tech stacks and Agile delivery throughout, a robust monitoring framework was delivered for real-time readiness checks, and total cost of ownership was reduced through modernisation and material de-risking of the technology estate.