Microland drives Digital Transformation for a large public services provider in the UK

Overview

Microland’s client, a UK-headquartered global public services provider, delivers critical operations spanning healthcare, transportation, immigration, defence, and more—impacting millions of lives daily. To keep pace with rising demands, the client adopted a cloud-first strategy, aiming to retire aging datacenters and modernize 900+ servers and 90+ applications without disrupting essential services like payroll and pensions for 40,000 employees. Partnering with Microland, the client leveraged our assessment frameworks, factory-based migration, FinOps practices, and intelligeni CloudOps platform to migrate 95% of workloads to Microsoft Azure, achieving $3M savings, 50% lower support costs, and zero service disruptions. 

Challenges

The client’s legacy infrastructure was no longer able to keep pace with evolving business demands and rising end-user expectations. With over 40,000 government employees relying on payroll and pension applications that run on 90+ critical systems and 100+ interfaces, the stakes were extremely high. The challenges included: 

• Aging and Inflexible Infrastructure: Two decades-old datacenters hosting 900+ physical and virtual servers, along with complex networking and storage, lacked the agility required to support modern business needs. 
• High Complexity and Operational Risk: The environment spanned production, test, development, and disaster recovery stacks, creating intricate dependencies and making change management difficult. 
• Pressure to Improve Speed, Flexibility, and Reliability: End-users demanded faster services and seamless experiences, but the legacy environment was a barrier. 
• Business-Critical Service Continuity: Any disruption during migration could directly impact payroll and pension processing for thousands of government employees. 
• Strategic Transformation Requirement: The client needed to retire the two datacenters and embrace a cloud-first strategy on Microsoft Azure, while simultaneously rationalizing applications, retiring redundant services, and enhancing service reliability. 

The client partnered with Microland for this project because of our experience in large-scale enterprise application and infrastructure migrations and our continued success in managing the client’s IT operations and platform services. 

Solution Provided

Microland, as the lead transformation partner, took complete ownership of the program—working closely with the client, third-party vendors, and external stakeholders to ensure a seamless transition to a cloud-first strategy on Microsoft Azure. Leveraging our proprietary methodology of Discover → Assess → Design → Plan → Build → Migrate → Decommission, we ensured that the migration was delivered with zero disruption to services. 

1. Comprehensive Assessment & Readiness 

Microland assessed 900+ servers, 90 applications, and the underlying infrastructure using its CAF ready Cloud Assessment Framework, evaluating Azure compatibility, interdependencies, licensing, and security. A structured migration plan was created, and a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) was established to define architectures, standards, and governance for the client’s cloud-first journey. 

2. Seamless Migration to Azure 

Microland designed a target-state Azure infrastructure with well architected Landing to boost availability, performance, scalability, and security. Key workloads, including Virtual Machines, Databases, SAP, and Dev/Test environments, were migrated including re-platforming of AIX to RHEL, Oracle to MS SQL and Citrix to AVD. Using Azure Migrate and Microland’s custom automation tools, migrations were executed in controlled phases with minimal downtime. The network was redesigned for cloud readiness, with close collaboration of hyperscalers and ensured a smooth, risk-free cutover. 

3. FinOps & Cost Optimization 

From Day 1, Microland implemented application and line-of-business-specific budgets, tagging policies, and cost controls to establish strong financial governance. Data storage was optimized through tiering, retention policies, and storage models, reducing the cost of dormant data. To further drive efficiency, Dev/Test scheduling was introduced, and DR strategies redefined, eliminating waste and lowering expenses. Additionally, Microland’s AI-assisted FinOps services, powered by AI/ML models, delivered real-time visibility into cloud spend, enabled accurate forecasting, prevented cost overruns, and strengthened overall budgeting accuracy. 

4. CloudOps & Ongoing Managed Services 

Microland transitioned the client to a modern operating model with intelligeni CloudOps, an AIOps platform built on AutomatedOps, GitOps, and SRE principles. This enabled automated provisioning and scaling, predictive monitoring, and self-healing for improved agility and reliability. A natural language interface simplified hybrid infrastructure management, empowering self-service for users and engineers, while AI-led anomaly detection prevented disruptions. Operations were secured and governed by CES+, CAF, and NIST-CIS best practices, reinforced through VA/PT reviews. 

Business Outcomes:  

The transformation program successfully modernized the client’s IT landscape, enabling agility, resilience, and measurable business value. Key outcomes included: 

• Enhanced Business Agility: Delivered an 80% improvement in key business processes performance and successfully migrated the client’s mission-critical SAP system from on-premises to Azure. A new Citrix farm was built, with over 2,000 users migrating seamlessly to Azure. 
• Legacy Application Management: Designed and implemented a “mothball” process to retain access to legacy applications incompatible with Azure, ensuring compliance and accessibility for the next 10 years. 
• Significant Cost Savings: Achieved $3 million in IT spend reduction, alongside a 50% reduction in operational support expenditure and 14% savings in Azure spend post-migration through effective FinOps practices. 
• Optimized Infrastructure: Migrated 95% of workloads to Azure, enabling a 30% reduction in server footprint while improving scalability and performance. 
• Operational Efficiency Gains: Reduced 1,500-hour monthly efforts, along with 99% patching success rate and 30% improvement in backup efficiency. 
• Uninterrupted Service Delivery: Executed the complex migration with zero disruptions, leveraging Microland’s factory-based migration approach. 

Microland continuously evolved the client’s cloud environment with data-driven insights, automated cost optimization, and cloud-native modernization practices. By delivering a full-stack solution, spanning Assessment, Migration, AI-assisted FinOps, and AI-powered CloudOps, Microland enabled the client to successfully decommission two 20-year-old datacenters, realize its cloud-first vision, and deliver reliable, secure, and cost-optimized services to a critical government workforce.