International Organization for Migration better able to support migrants in crisis with help from cloud-based solutions

IT has always played a key role in providing the agency’s frontline workers with tools they can use to react quickly and effectively to changing situations on the ground and help keep its people and data safe. The agency recognizes the rapidly expanding role of IT in addressing changing migrant needs. Consequently, IOM decided to position itself as a leader and innovator by strengthening its framework for data governance, resilience, and mobility to become a more agile and sustainable organization.

Getting out of the datacenter business and refocusing on its mission

To achieve its vision, IOM resolved to decentralize its operations, make its IT infrastructure highly secure, resilient, and efficient, transform the agency’s internal business processes, and adopt scalable and flexible solutions based on actionable data to speed decision making and meet migrants’ needs in agile, more responsive ways. IOM’s scope, however, creates unique challenges for its IT environment. “We work both for governments and on behalf of migrants, and that makes our data extremely sensitive,” says Marietta Muwanga-Ssevume, Chief Information Officer at the International Organization for Migration. Additionally, the agency’s aging infrastructure was becoming an issue.

IOM had three on-premises datacenters and 500 old, overprovisioned virtual machines (VMs). Security, backups, and monitoring relied on systems administrators for oversight and deployment. Networking and hardware problems in IOM datacenters caused unplanned outages, some of which significantly disrupted operations, and data security was a concern. Rising maintenance and renewal costs also made it difficult to update critical components, and by 2019, the agency estimated that 80 percent of its servers needed replacement.

IT leaders concluded that IOM should get out of the datacenter business and refocus on its humanitarian mission of supporting end-to-end migrant journeys. “We wanted to be a more responsive organization with scalable, flexible solutions that better meet the needs of migrants and our implementing partners,” says Muwanga-Ssevume. “We could no longer accomplish that with our aging technological infrastructure.” IOM decided to shutter its datacenters and become a cloud-first organization.

The right choice for its own migration

The agency evaluated the implications, risks, and challenges related to its move, including the legal issues surrounding the ingestion of government data, the personally identifiable information of migrants, and global compliance mandates. It also had to address organizational needs, including strict transparency in financial accounting and the staff training that would be required for such a momentous technological transformation.

IOM soon realized that it needed strategic partners to achieve its goal, and after careful planning and risk mitigation, the agency chose Microsoft Azure as its cloud platform. IOM determined that Microsoft delivered the best value, the maximum level of cloud technology investment, and the most support for its staff throughout the organization’s cloud journey. “The people element was extremely important in our selection of Azure,” says Muwanga-Ssevume. “Microsoft was the right choice to help us mature our IT department in the cloud space and expand our portfolio while also helping protect our sensitive information.”

IOM brought Microsoft Partner Network member Kainos onboard because of its broad cloud migration experience in both the private and public sectors and its shared organizational values. IOM, Kainos, and Microsoft quickly formed a close and productive team. After a couple months of assessment and planning, the team seamlessly migrated IOM’s VMs to Azure. “There was no downtime, and our users didn’t even know the switchover had occurred,” says Muwanga-Ssevume. “They simply noticed that some things were faster from certain locations—especially from some of our low-connectivity locations.”

Improved security, availability, and resiliency

A key component of the deployment is Azure landing zones, wherein applications and IOM’s development, test, and operations teams, along with other staff, can use Azure services in a standard, policy-driven, monitorable, and highly secure way. Azure landing zones underpin all the agency’s services, taking advantage of automation tooling and continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines to achieve a repeatable deployment model that supports future expansion of IOM’s global cloud footprint, including the accommodation of multiple remote sites.

IOM significantly improved its security, risk management, and compliance by transitioning to the cloud. With its VMs now in the cloud, the agency no longer has to manually update operating systems or perform many other tedious, manual systems administration tasks across multiple datacenters and frontline deployments. Data residency was also important, and IOM worked with Microsoft to help ensure that data gets hosted in locations that meet different stakeholders’ requirements.

Because one of the agency’s migrated datacenters housed its disaster recovery environment, Microsoft and Kainos designed a modern disaster recovery infrastructure for IOM in Azure. To safeguard the agency’s assets and gain peace of mind that its applications and data are highly available, resilient, and backed up, the team used Azure availability zones, Azure Site Recovery, and Azure Backup.

Bridging the gap between IT and people amid humanitarian crisis

In just six months, IOM became the only UN organization with nearly all of its resources in the cloud. It chose Microsoft and Kainos in part because they could help the agency’s IT staff quickly add the skills needed to support the new environment. To date, almost 100 staff members have completed Azure trainings, and more than 50 have successfully completed Azure certifications. “Our success has been a door opener,” says Muwanga-Ssevume. “We’ve shown our partners that it’s possible to do a cloud transformation well and do it quickly.” Additionally, the retirement of its technical debt has removed the need to reinvest in hardware, and IOM can now devote more money to programs and missions, facilitating more agile development and faster time to innovation.

The 2021 crisis in Afghanistan was the first real test of the agency’s flexibility and responsiveness in the cloud. IOM teams in Kabul needed help securing the mission’s data and switching to fully remote work in a critically short time frame. IOM used its new Azure infrastructure to provide continuity of service for its mission. In less than a week, the agency was able to expand its cloud environment to provide coverage with minimal downtime, upload all of its mission data and on-premises applications to the cloud, and remotely wipe all of its onsite hard disks. The event successfully demonstrated the cloud’s efficacy and how IOM’s future missions might work using a serverless model.

The agency also credits its move to the cloud for providing a welcome sustainability boost. By retiring its on-premises datacenters and diminishing the computational loads stemming from outdated code, IOM reduced power consumption and cut its carbon emissions footprint by 92 percent, or 594 tons of CO2e saved annually. “Global warming is a cause of many migrant crises, so countering the very source of the problem by moving to Azure is a point of organizational pride,” says Muwanga-Ssevume.

No longer “data rich but information poor”

Muwanga-Ssevume describes IOM’s previous IT environment as “data rich but information poor” because its data assets were spread over hundreds of servers in three countries. By migrating to the cloud, eliminating data silos, and improving access to information across the organization, IOM is now able to react quickly and intelligently to scenarios in only a few days, which previously would have taken weeks. And it’s more efficient in terms of managing risks, spending, and controlling costs.

The agency has also laid the foundation for an ambitious transformation to derive deep insights from its data through advanced analytics. Before IOM’s cloud implementation, it wasn’t possible to follow individual migrants in terms of travel, health, and protection support. With cloud computing, however, IOM will soon have far more personal insights and even be able to interact with and directly support migrants. “Now, we’ll be able to accurately tell individual migrant stories, which is extremely important to our mission and the donors who fund us,” says Muwanga-Ssevume. “We’re working with people for whom life is already very hard, but we’re changing to make it easier for them to engage with us and get the services we provide to make their lives better.”

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The use of the IOM name or emblem or any abbreviation thereof does not imply that IOM endorses any of the Microsoft (or its affiliates’) products or services described herein.