Revolutionizing Amsterdam's Public Transport with Cloud Solutions

Migration from IT-Environment to azure

CloudNation has partnered with GVB to successfully migrate their IT environment to the Azure cloud.

Goal

With over 5000 employees GVB takes care of public transport for almost 1 million travellers a day in the city of Amsterdam. The continuous delivery of their services calls for a highly available, secure and stable IT environment. Having a cloud first policy GVB is working on a large migration of the on-premises IT environment to Microsoft Azure, to ensure they can keep delivering their services, built on a modern IT infrastructure. We helped design, migrate and implement a variety of cloud solutions to build a solid base in Azure for the applications we helped migrate to.

People

When starting the project we noticed that there was very limited knowledge of cloud solutions in technical terms, as well as organizational terms. Next to that many were reluctant to move to the cloud. A cloud environment challenges an organization and their people to have a new view on and new approach to an IT environment and its organization. Part of making GVB cloud ready was teaching the engineers more about how to benefit the new possibilities the cloud brings and how to make optimal use of the capabilities. Next to that there was an organizational challenge to move from an operational role to a directing role.

Tech

Legacy hardware and the choice to not invest in new hardware contributed to the decision GVB made to make a move to the Azure cloud platform. We helped GVB making the translation from a traditional on-premises IT environment to a cloud environment.

Because of the limited timeframe we made distinction between end-state solutions and lift & shift solutions. For each seperate application and solution was decided where to migrate it to. Factors taken into consideration for these decisions were complexity and lifecycle.