SoftwareOne successfully take Royal Society of Chemistry on their journey to the cloud

The challenge

RSC’s IT estate had remained stable but growing, hosted on over 500 Windows servers, and housed across multiple physical datacentres. All research papers, documents, and other data, accessed by interested parties across the world, is processed and maintained on this equipment. With tens of thousands of research submissions supporting the publication, dissemination and archiving of this research material, thousands of researchers are accessing this content from across the globe at any given moment in time, leading to an increasing demand for both storage, processing, access and stability.

A significant part of the RSC’s IT estate had reached (or exceeded) end of life, creating ongoing supportability challenges and technical limitations, and restricting their capability in meeting the needs of their customers and their business. In view of these limitations the RSC’s Technology leadership team concluded that a large-scale migration to the Public Cloud is the most practical and financially advantageous next step. This decision was followed by an evaluation of all three main Public Cloud providers, which resulted in the selection of AWS.

The solution

As it charted its transition to AWS, RSC set out a clear success criterion which was the optimal and full adoption of AWS not only by IT, but by the entire organisation. From early in the project, the RSC set out to ensure that AWS was adopted using best practices and was fully leveraged to bring real advantages and benefits to Business Operations, Product Development, and Innovation, as well as IT.

SoftwareOne proposed the creation of a Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE), that would holistically address the RSC’s concerns on:

• IT roadmap development, delivery, and governance
• IT and business operational changes (such as DevOps)
• Training, re-skilling and human resource change management
• Product innovation
• Finance & purchasing

SoftwareOne recommended using AWS and industry best practices, Frameworks (such as AWS Cloud Adoption Framework and Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT)) to fully and effectively manage the overall change that the successful adoption of AWS would require.

Transitioning the entire business from a physical hosting model to a Cloud model on AWS meant transforming the skills and operational model of the organisation, hence the need for a CCoE approach, to put cloud and a DevOps approach as a central pillar in the company’s operational model.

SoftwareOne clearly articulated to the RSC the challenges that the AWS transition would pose, alongside the benefits that the creation of the CCoE would bring in maximising such a significant investment in adopting AWS.

SoftwareOne’s strong knowledge and capabilities in AWS, coupled with the experience, skills, and ability to guide customers through the whole journey of Public Cloud adoption and in all aspects of such a journey (not only technical) identified SoftwareOne as a suitable partner to help the RSC establish and operate the CCoE. SoftwareOne’s predefined CCoE offering, that ‘timeboxed’ focused activities and the overall process right from the start, resulted in a cost-effective, quality and deliverable’s driven project execution, would enable the RSC to set up and operate a CCoE in support of the AWS adoption with razor-sharp precision incredibly early in the programme.

To understand the “As-is” status of the organisation and the “To-be” vision, in support of the CCoE creation, and to ensure the transformation would deliver maximum benefit to the whole organisation, SoftwareOne undertook a unique and comprehensive benchmarking exercise based on industry-leading standards-based operational audit tools.