As Emory continues to evolve in the ever-changing university computing landscape, cloud computing stands at the forefront of the next era in IT. Emory’s Cloud Implementation Migration Project (CIMP) certainly has IT professionals across campus taking note, with record numbers attending our presentation at the IT Briefing in October.
The purpose of this project is to research and recommend strategies and options for the migration of Emory University IT assets to the cloud. This effort includes performing a cloud-readiness assessment of our existing infrastructure, delivering a set of planning tools and recommendations (no applications or services will be migrated during this phase), and preparing the team to perform migrations to the cloud with minimal external support.
The CIMP guiding principles provide a framework for the effort. Those principles are:
- “Cloud-first” preference – a first option for all new software implementations
- AWS (Amazon Web Services) as preferred cloud provider for IaaS (infrastructure as a service), PaaS (platform as a service)
- Agility – our ability to be flexible and quicker with implementations
- Regional redundancy – a broader regional implementation of disaster recovery
- Take advantage of AWS – leveraging new services as Amazon offers them
- Cost savings – over the lifecycle of the migration and beyond
- Elasticity – being able to scale to the different demands of our customers
- Innovation – increasing our ability to offer creative solutions
The benefits Emory hopes to achieve from the project involve agility (building solutions faster, using best-of-breed business applications, regardless of platform, and handling difficult to predict requirements) and cost (aligning costs more closely with usage, better management of growth of physical environments, quality improvements, and benefiting from competition and improved economies of scale). Additional benefits include providing more predictable service, increasing standardization, improved disaster recovery, access to new technologies, and increased focus on business solutions.
We have chosen a few applications as use cases to model planning templates and develop patterns for migration. In some cases, we may choose to re-architect applications to improve performance and stability in the cloud. The pilot applications for migration testing will be:
- Confluence (Wiki)
- OnBase
- PeopleSoft/ELM
- Shibboleth
- Web Hosting – www.emory.edu
- Clinical Trials
In terms of a timeline, the team has completed the readiness assessment and is spending the next few months performing readiness development and migration planning. The CIMP Project is expected to complete in the beginning of 2019 and the actual migrations should begin soon after. We anticipate that it will take from one to two years to complete all of the migrations.
A Cloud Advisory Group has been formed to help guide the overall effort with strategy and critical decisions. This group will continue beyond the CIMP project, providing overall migration status.
The project team consists of Alex Berry, Ramya Bommareddy, Caleb Boyd, Joel Burke, Nataliya Bykova, Andrew Chin, Steve Collins, Derek Cox, Zach Cox, Mike Davidson, Andy Efting, Eddie Feliciano, Raj Garrepally, Gerry Hall, Jim Houghton, Tod Jackson, Sergey Kamenetskiy, Mark Kawasaki, Mike Lewis, Rohith Mandala, Paul Petersen (Cloud Advisory Group Lead), Jocelyn Ramirez (project manager), Steve Siegelman, Brad Smith, Derek Spransy, and Ramona Tucker. The project sponsor is John Ellis.
Stay tuned for upcoming announcements, especially at the IT Briefing, as this project continues.