Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) on Azure enable cloud-first strategy for Forestry and Land Scotland

Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) manages more than 1.5 million acres of national forests and land – approximately 9% of the nation’s total land area. It’s a big job for the relatively new organization; FLS was created in 2019 as part of the Scottish devolution process. Devolution is the transferring of powers and responsibilities from a central government to a regional or local government – in this case from the UK to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland got its own Parliament in 1999 after a referendum in 1997, and its powers have gradually increased since then.   

The purview of FLS includes not just forestry but tourism, leisure, nature conservation and other related activities – all of which require a hefty amount of data and IT infrastructure. FLS inherited legacy platforms housed in a decades-old datacenter, which was in direct misalignment with the Scottish government’s cloud-first strategy.  

“From the very start we had an aspiration to pursue a cloud-first strategy,” said Nick Mahlitz, Senior Digital Infrastructure Manager for FLS. “We had an on-prem environment that was aging that needed modernization and refreshment. But the process to go from that to the cloud was a big jump too far too soon.” 

A step toward the cloud  

With an eye on an eventual cloud migration, Mahlitz and the team procured a private datacenter provider and utilized hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), selecting the Nutanix Cloud Platform to support a workload of about 300 virtual machines. These VMs, supporting a mix of back-end applications, databases and supporting services, were hosted using the Nutanix AHV hypervisor with extra resilience added using bundled Nutanix data replication tools, with backups on Azure. The solution prioritized rapid scalability and provided a single console to manage on-premises and cloud-based VM infrastructure with no specialist skills required. This was a boon for the agency, which was not keen to sign up for costly service agreements or hire contractors.  

The upgrade not only created some breathing room as FLS formulated a plan for a cloud migration but also provided immediate benefits beyond the expected scalability and performance. The agency’s datacenter footprint was reduced significantly, saving money and decreasing the impact on the environment with lower power and cooling needs.  

Three years later, when the organization’s contract with its private datacenter provider was ending, FLS decided it was time to take the next step of the journey and move to Azure. Mahlitz learned that the organization’s workloads could be migrated to Azure using Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) without application refactoring or reskilling. NC2 provides unified management across hybrid clouds with applications, data and license portability. Mahlitz says he initially saw NC2 as a contingency plan or stopgap solution to help the organization exit its datacenter and then re-engineer its various applications to run natively on Azure. But then a pilot of NC2 changed everything.  

From backup plan to plan A

Nutanix and Microsoft created a proof of concept trial of Nutanix NC2 on Azure using FLS production workloads. This gave FLS insight into the benefits of using the same tools and resources within Azure. FLS was able to transfer existing product licenses across to Azure and use built-in data replication and migration tools to simplify and automate the many processes involved. 

That proof of concept helped NC2 shift from being a backup plan to the primary approach. Mahlitz still speaks excitedly of the moment he realized that NC2 and Azure could work together to buy the organization time to further modernize and create cloud-native systems.

“We realized we can migrate our workloads and preserve our workloads because they’re already running on Nutanix,” Mahlitz says. “The technology stack will not change, but we’re running in Azure and then we can adopt some of those Azure services too.”

Mahlitz says Azure was always the organization’s choice of cloud provider because the digital services team for the organization was familiar with and skilled in Azure. Combining Azure with the also-familiar Nutanix by using NC2 made for a smooth migration. Most of the systems were a straight lift and shift that will be modernized gradually as needed.

With support from Nutanix and Microsoft, FLS was able to complete its migration in 18 months with no disruption to operations and has been “free of all hardware” since November 2023, Mahlitz says. As one of the first public agencies in the region to adopt this approach, FLS is now seen as a model for cloud transformations across the UK government. 

“NC2 and Azure gave us time to modernize, while also tapping into the opportunities that Azure can offer us,” he says. “And while this was a big change for us in the digital and IT teams, the rest of the organization didn’t see it; it was all under the hood.”

Setting an example

No one had taken this approach before, and FLS is viewed as a trailblazer by other public sector organizations; Mahlitz is frequently asked to share their journey and learnings as others consider their own paths to the cloud. He has written extensive documentation and speaks to other organizations weighing their options for modernization. And while Mahlitz acknowledges that what the organization accomplished with NC2 and Azure is groundbreaking, he’s quick to clarify the amount of due diligence and risk management that was done in the process.  

That level of research not only provided assurance for the FLS directors and leaders who had to sign off on the project but also ensured that the Scottish governance bodies that provide oversight would be satisfied with the approach. The pilot program was critical in getting buy-in from all parties.

“We spent time building a cluster on Azure, migrating some test services to that, accessing those services and making sure that not only the technical teams understood what we were doing, but that our approach was in line with the principles that they want all public bodies to align to and that our internal technology leaders were satisfied this was the right approach,” Mahlitz says. 

When he shares information with other agencies, it’s that due diligence that gives Mahlitz confidence in recommending that others explore their own cloud journeys, whether that’s cloud-first as FLS did or hybrid. 

“It can give you the time that you need to do the other things,” he says. “And time is always something we don’t have in public sector because of budgets.”