MINCIT, Migration to the Public Cloud

The Challenge

Public entities in Colombia are obliged to implement the Online Government Strategy and the Digital Government policy that governs this obligation, defining as a strategic objective, encouraging the use and exploitation of ICT to consolidate a competitive State and citizens, where The aim is to ensure that the use of technology is agile, simple and useful for people and the different actors involved.

For MINCIT, the challenges derived from this commitment include aspects inherent to the increase in demand for services provided through the Internet, which made it necessary to acquire or improve the performance of its software developments.

Because MINCIT had a hyperconverged infrastructure platform composed of software and hardware elements (servers and storage) based on a traditional physical storage scheme, it was necessary to reevaluate this infrastructure and opt for a platform that would guarantee high availability and scalability.

For this, Clouxter services were hired to migrate, configure and support
the implementation of an infrastructure under a cloud-hosting scheme
public AWS.

Strategy and Solution proposed by Clouxter

Time, costs, and resources were the three crucial factors when deciding which migration strategy should be adopted.

Therefore, the “lift and shift” strategy was addressed, where the capabilities of the local infrastructure (on-premise) were moved to another infrastructure with similar characteristics in the cloud, which represented a minimal impact risk approach. at the application level, achieving in turn, having the infrastructure in the shortest possible time.

This migration had 48 servers within its scope, under the following premises:

  • 4 waves of migration were established to carry out an orderly and efficient migration.
  • Deployment of servers for Fortinet and assistance in infrastructure configuration were carried out.
  • Automatic backups to servers were implemented with AWS Backup
  • An analysis of CPU and RAM metrics of the servers was generated to optimize the instances.

Managing to carry out this migration successfully, in six months.

Benefits

Many benefits can be obtained from hosting infrastructure in the cloud. But for MINCIT 4 major items meant substantial improvements compared to its previous on-premise solution:

  • Performance improvement: Machine sizes and capacities were optimized, maintaining application performance and using appropriate resources. For example, we can mention two of the most critical servers:
    • VUCEARCH – C4.4xlarge was optimized to C4.2xlarge
    • SRVARVUCE – C4.2xlarge was optimized to C4.xlarge
  • Cost optimization: Derived from the optimization of instances and the improvement in infrastructure performance, the costs associated with consumption are substantially reduced. It is an implicit benefit of the cloud scheme, the ability to frequently analyze the capabilities of the resources and adjust it depending on the need, avoiding underutilization and therefore paying for what is needed.
  • Minimum Impact: A “Clean” transition was carried out without interruptions and with zero impacts on daily operations and applications, derived from the technology change. An example that demonstrates the minimum impact is the use of the same private IPs of the On-premise architecture, in this new scheme in the AWS cloud.
  • Long-term value: Although this Migration has generated immediate operational benefits, it also had a positive impact on the culture of cloud adoption that is evident in long-term opportunities for Mincit, for which two subsequent phases were proposed. :
    • 2nd phase of application containerization, to improve resource utilization and rapid scaling
    • 3rd phase of Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) Implementation, to guarantee the high availability of resources and services hosted in the cloud.

About MINCIT

The Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Tourism supports business activity, production of goods, services, and technology, as well as tourism management in the country’s regions to improve their competitiveness and sustainability and encourage the generation of greater added value.

The primary objective within the framework of its competence is to formulate, adopt, direct, and coordinate general policies regarding the economic and social development of the country, related to the competitiveness, integration, and development of the productive sectors of industry, microenterprise, small and medium, foreign trade in goods, services, and technology, the promotion of foreign investment, internal trade, and tourism; and execute foreign trade policies, general plans, programs, and projects.

About Clouxter

At Clouxter we enable the path of adoption and consolidation of the cloud in organizations. Our focus is on DevOps, Migration, security, and analytics, providing the key pieces to have a great Cloud strategy. We have extensive experience in different industries such as banking, Media, Fintech, Public Sector, ISVs, and Startups.

We accompany organizations on this path and accelerate their adoption curve, covering the definition, planning, implementation, and operation of their solutions, through our professional consulting services, managed services, and local billing.

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