County council works smarter, saves conversion time and cost with Azure VMware Solution

Keeping a county online while planning a migration

Nottinghamshire County has several offices that coordinate all manner of services for county citizens—everything from social services to recycling—run by Nottinghamshire County Council. For Nottinghamshire County Council Platforms Manager, Rob Wilde, that means responsibility for an environment that supports 750 applications. When the Council IT department received orders to embark on a five-year plan to move Nottinghamshire County Council’s completely on-premises landscape to the cloud, its information and communications technology (ICT) teams faced a daunting challenge. 

Determining the optimal approach and cloud platform would be tricky. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) models both would give the Council the advantages of offloading responsibility for maintaining on-premises infrastructure such as servers and network devices. But several applications needed to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week—incurring IaaS cloud costs that the Council hoped to avoid. Nottinghamshire County Council wanted to find a more cost-effective model that would support fluctuating demand. Other applications were governed by data protection regulations that precluded cloud migration. The Council’s web applications, for example, had been hosted on-premises. Internal security policy dictated that many of them remain there. Years earlier, the Council ran into snags when it began to move some services from its on-premises datacenter to the cloud. “We struggled with the lift-and-shift method,” explains Rob. “Moving some of the legacy and some of the more complex applications using native Azure IaaS or native virtual machines was extremely difficult.” 

Now, the bulk of the move lay before them, and the team faced a firm deadline. Its datacenter was slated for demolition in the spring of 2022. The team needed a way to extend its cloud-first approach for this ongoing project so it could migrate apps that couldn’t be taken to the cloud before. It found that capability in Azure VMware Solution. 

Enhancing flexibility 

Ultimately, the Council would move about half of its applications, retaining a portion of its on-premises infrastructure to support those that couldn’t be migrated to the cloud for regulatory or policy reasons. Council IT staff recognized the Azure VMware Solution as a service model to be a better fit for the applications that could run in the cloud and chose Azure because it offered the most beneficial pricing model. Using the Azure calculator made it easier to forecast those costs—an important benefit for a government organization. It would also deliver the service, flexibility, and scalability that could help Nottinghamshire County Council ICT teams to support the Council and more than 800,000 citizens. 

On the security front, the Council needs to attain yearly certifications for the General Data Protection Regulation and other regulations that mandate restricting certain data on the internet. “We decided to use Azure datacenters located only in the United Kingdom,” explains Rob. “That enabled us to plan a quicker, easier move to Azure and the various Azure services we wanted to benefit from.”

During its search for a different paradigm for maintaining and delivering its IT environment, the Council learned about Azure VMware Solution. “What a game-changer for us,” says Rob. “As a VMware house, we saw how easy it would be to move applications from VMware to Azure VMware Solution because it’s bolted onto the back of Azure.” 

Planning the migration, the team leaned on Microsoft innovations to move as much data to Azure as possible, using convenient Azure facilities like Azure App Service. “We used Azure VMware Solution to shift our on-premises virtual machines to Azure without worrying about the other migration details that would complicate a move to a native IaaS infrastructure,” explains Rob. “As for our restricted web applications that run on virtual machines on-premises, we’re moving most of them from an IaaS model to the Web Apps feature of Azure App Service.”

Bringing Microsoft to the team for expert VMware support

Rob’s team gained additional value from the Microsoft solutions it rolled out at Nottinghamshire County Council by working with the Azure VMware Solution specialists on the Microsoft Global Black Belt team, a group of technical experts who work closely with product teams to acquire deep technical skills in their particular areas. “The Global Black Belt specialists played an invaluable part in our successful Azure deployment,” says Rob. “They helped us with other technologies as well, like Web Apps. They’ve made a massive difference to the way we approach certain scenarios, and they continue to be available when we need them.” 

Crystal clear documentation also helped. “Every step was explained very well,” adds Rob. “I really can’t emphasize enough how much the documentation and our Global Black Belt team helped us.” It wasn’t a one-way knowledge transfer; the Council IT team members also provided valuable feedback for their Microsoft counterparts. “Our Global Black Belt team relayed our suggestions to product teams and greatly accelerated our pilot,” he explains. It bears noting that the Council IT team completed the entire project remotely, yet without impediments, even during the height of pandemic lockdowns in the United Kingdom.

When it came to reducing operating costs, Nottinghamshire County Council found that Microsoft offered the advantages it needed. “We’re slowly moving the applications and data we now have in native Azure virtual machines to Azure VMware Solution because we get a longer-term cost benefit than we could with native IaaS,” explains Rob. His team uses Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit. “We use Azure Reserved Instances across the board, including for our native Azure IaaS,” he says. “That gives us a 55 percent reduction over three years for the cost of a virtual machine.”

According to Rob, the Council has used Azure Hybrid Benefit “since day one,” especially for its Windows-based devices. And he plans to assess using Azure Reserved Instances for Azure storage solutions at Nottinghamshire County Council.

Building a future-ready system to support Nottinghamshire

Now on the other side of the initial disruption caused by the pandemic and an internal restructure, Rob is happy with the solution’s positive impacts on his colleagues and on the Nottinghamshire citizens they serve. With plans to reduce its on-premises footprint underway, Nottinghamshire County Council will retain a small infrastructure locally. And it’s already begun to realize the productivity advantages of moving to the cloud. “Our team is beginning to offload manual processes,” Rob says. “That means they’ll be free for more strategic work, including a lot of organizational priorities. They will be able to divert time from mundane tasks like patching or upgrading servers and instead deliver more projects that benefit the people of Nottinghamshire.”

Yet to come are refinements on the progress made to date, with less critical data slated for less expensive storage, like Azure Files. “The option to shift data from Azure VMware Solution to Azure Files for things like templates and slow storage strikes me as a great way to further optimize our costs,” says Rob. 

He also plans to refine disaster recovery for Azure VMware Solution. Nottinghamshire County Council has effectively had a recovery capability with its hybrid infrastructure and access to the Azure UK West region. Rob looks forward to the private preview for upcoming availability zones in the Azure UK South datacenter and the potential it offers for increased resilience. “The availability zones Azure offers will be key for our team and for our entire organization.” 

Given the success of the move, there’s no going back. “We’ll use Azure VMware Solution for any new server we build, other than anything that absolutely must run on-premises for a regulatory reason,” says Rob. “That’s how committed we are to this flexible, modern model.” 

He and his team are impressed by how easy the solution made it for them to handle such an initially daunting project. “My advice to another organization? Don’t hesitate to roll out Azure VMware Solution to help you move cloud services, lift and shift, or just move away from on-premises in general,” concludes Rob. “I truly believe in this technology—it’s fantastic.” 

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