With over twenty-five off the shelf and custom applications requiring a relational database backend, the importance of migrating instances to an agnostic infrastructure was critical to one Intelligence Agency in particular. Plagued by constant hardware renewals and storage failures, Blackspoke provided a streamlined method of migrating from an outdated out premise solution. Some of the applications in question provided real-time data to troops on the ground so it was important to quickly engineer and migrate the application back-end data to the cloud with zero downtime. Moving to the cloud meant that the system would have to maintain its level of performance, integrity and be able to scale as needed.

Blackspoke and its team of engineers quickly provided a proof of concept to simulate the work load that the current system was accustomed to. By using custom developed Powershell scripts, Blackspoke was able to collect and reproduce a near exact system load within the AWS cloud. Using the cloud approach also let the team spin-up multiple environments for application owners to test migrations which helped facilitate successful migrations. Blackspoke also created environments for future upgrade and testing of applications, something the Agency did not have. Overall, a project that was scheduled to take almost 1 year took less than 7 months to fully engineer, deploy and migrate and saved the agency over 250k dollars in hardware expenditures, maintenance renewals and downtime.

• 100% Fully Migrated Relation DB to an AWS Cloud
• 1st Intelligence Agency to use SQL 2014 Always-On technology in the AWS Cloud
• 35% Reduction to Project time-frame (Engineering, Deployment, and Migration)
• Fully replicated environments for Development, User Testing and Production
• Over 250k in cost savings