Precision Under Pressure: Migrating a County Government Out of a Shared Environment

Blue Hill Data Services manages critical IT hosting for clients of all sizes. In most migrations, Blue Hill can literally pick up a client’s environment and move it “as-is” into their private cloud. In this case, however, the move could not happen that way. This client was currently hosted with another service provider in a shared ‘comingled’ environment.  During our internal review, our dedicated account manager summarized it: “Moving a full environment can be like moving a refrigerator with everything inside it, you can easily get it all.” For this client, we had to start with an empty refrigerator. This meant rebuilding the environment at Blue Hill from scratch.  Because the environment at the existing provider contained other client data and proprietary software/tools, Blue Hill had no access to the existing production environment.  We worked with two different companies to request and obtain the items we were allowed to receive, loading the files into the scratch environment, making the migration a highly controlled, precise effort, what we like to call IT surgery.

The Challenge: The client needed to migrate into Blue Hill’s data center, but Blue Hill’s team could not copy their environment as a whole. Key issues included:

• Discovery constraints: We only knew certain parts of the setup and had to identify exactly which applications/data to move. Some of what we needed was considered proprietary to the existing vendor, or so heavily co-mingled with other clients that the vendor wouldn’t deliver it.  
• No access / visibility to existing environment: Blue Hill had to rely on information provided by the client and current IT contacts.  We had no way to validate what we were told other than to try it and see.
• Restricted Access to Key Technical Stakeholders: Communication with the target IT team was heavily restricted, with all interactions required to go through an intermediary. This created long delays in scheduling even basic meetings, added significant administrative red tape, and slowed access to the subject matter experts needed to keep the migration moving efficiently.
• Software dependencies: The client’s systems included third-party software. We had to account for licenses and ensure we obtained the older versions the client was running.
• Coordination: We coordinated closely with the client’s IT contacts to retrieve needed items in the right order and at the right time in the process.

Blue Hill’s Solution: Blue Hill approached this as a build-first, data-focused migration:

• Target environment build: We first provisioned and validated the destination infrastructure in our data center (compute, storage, network) to handle the customer’s workload.
• Iterative data transfer: Working with the client’s team, we received only the required data, databases, and application components.
• Software review: We reviewed the client’s software inventory list. For example, we noted Broadcom-related software and ensured proper licensing (or replacements) were in place.
• Validation: At each stage we performed checks to ensure services ran correctly on the new system before cutting over fully. Planned testing minimized disruption for this migration.

Results: 

• Migration success!!
• Improved Processing Cycles: processing cycles now run faster, reducing batch times from one hour to half an hour.
• Enhanced Control and Flexibility: Blue Hill offers the client greater control over their environment, allowing them to customize report availability, timeout settings, and other operational parameters.

Responsive Support and Communication: The Blue Hill team maintains a highly responsive support relationship with the client.

Customer Quote: (Example pull-quote format for design purposes)

“Our experience with the Blue Hill team on our transition was extremely positive.  They worked with the many constraints from our previous vendor and found solutions to move our environment.  Since they had to work with two other companies, there were coordination issues that led to time delays but the Blue Hill team, especially Donna, stayed on task and was diligent about keeping us on a very tight schedule to accomplish our transition on time.” – County IT Analyst

Key Takeaways:

• Comprehensive inventory and planning are critical, especially when you can’t do a straight lift-and-shift.
• Confirming software licenses and dependencies upfront (e.g. Broadcom tools) avoids surprises.