Cantium Navigates Kent County Council’s Strategic Digital Transformation Programme

The scale of the programme of work was vast and included:

• 2 data centres
• Over a dozen firewalls
• 120 physical cabinets
• Over 280 applications
• 625 servers (181 physical, 444 virtual)

Cantium’s extensive experience of KCC’s ICT estate, coupled with our knowledge of cloud technology, enabled us to deliver the benefits of flexing their infrastructure resources depending on demand at any time of the day or year. Not only does this provide the benefit of reducing the need to have large infrastructure estates, it provides the ability to scale resources only when required.

Cantium were responsible for the overarching delivery of programme and project management for each of the work streams as well as providing the technical knowledge, resource and expertise to deliver the programme’s objectives.

At the core of the programme was the migration of all on-premise hosted applications that can be hosted in Microsoft Azure. As part of the programme of works, an assessment was undertaken via a Cloud Suitability Assessment (CSA) from which, 169 applications were identified as suitable for migration.

To ensure the security of the solution, Cantium’s security team implemented a ‘walled garden’ in the production subscription using Check Point firewalls following National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) guidance to ensure the required standard was met.

As part of the migration programme, Cantium staff created service maps of the entire KCC on-premise estate, documenting the current setup and how it operated, ready for its migration to the cloud. This helped inform the complexity analysis that was necessary to be undertaken on each application and which identified and informed the priority order for applications to be migrated across.

To execute the migration, Cantium staff used the Azure Site Recovery Tool to ‘lift and shift’ virtual machines into the new environment. Where it was necessary for SQL Servers to be present, these were built fresh into the Azure environment and applications databases were copied over onto new clusters or as standalone instances as required. As part of the migration, SQL version updates were completed where possible as part of the process to ease the transition.