Migration of a legacy app to the cloud

Our client, a financial services group with over 1,000 employees, needed to migrate an on-premises application to the cloud. The migration would be our client's first cloud-based application.

With millions of personal documents, security and confidentiality were critical.

The client's first Azure deployment

The legacy application was a critical tool for their call centre team but was slow to use. It was also difficult and expensive to maintain. We advised on the platform architecture that the different parts of the application would require. We offered security guidance and worked with their Information Security team to deliver a demonstrably safe platform.

We developed software for the critical application components. We supported their internal developers with training and guidance on building resilient cloud-based software.

The application was closely integrated with on-premises components to manage the flow of additional data sources.

Read more: Azure development services

An agile approach

The features of the legacy broadly defined the requirements. Agile project management supported the development priorities and progress reporting. We worked with the client's internal teams to support handover after the completion of our initial engagement.

We helped create the user stories for the project and recommended how to prioritise the features. We provided training and support to help their permanent technical team get started with agile tools such as Azure Dev Ops and continuous deployments.

Read more: An agile approach to development projects

Data migration

The application relied on data for approximately a quarter of a million policyholders, with several million additional supporting medical and personal documents. Data was migrated from on-premises SQL Server legacy databases to Azure SQL. The data migration required custom pipelines to deliver data quality and cleansing improvements.

We generated artificial mocked data for use during development and initial testing to ensure GDPR compliance.

Read more: Data migration services

The project was delivered successfully, ahead of the required delivery date and within budget.

Handover of the application code to the client's development team was completed, along with training material.

The application was successfully security tested by an independent third-party penetration testing team.