Microland Reduced the Operations Cost by 25% for UK’s Second-Largest Gas Distributor Company with modernized Cloud Operations

Overview

The client is a UK-based gas distribution company that oversees the network that supplies 5.9 million households and businesses in Scotland and England with natural and green gas. As of 2014–2015, they ran more than 44,000 kilometers of pipes. During the same year, the client had invested £500 million in network upgrades.

Business Challenge

The client was struggling through an ageing IT infrastructure to support their utilities that faced challenges in meeting the evolving regulatory requirements and keeping pace with the ever-increasing customer expectations. Initially, one of their incumbent technology service provider, a tier-1 global system integrator, was running the cloud operations program on AWS leveraging Amazon Managed Services (AMS). This led to cost-heavy services which compounded project cost overruns exceeding £10M.

The client wanted to migrate their cloud instances from AMS to a more cost-efficient service and cloud operations model, which the incumbent GSI found difficult to implement. The client decided to roll out a transformation RFP for this exercise.

Solution

Microland partnered with a leading global utility consulting and solution provider to migrate and manage the client’s cloud operation services. Microland recommended a strategy for managing critical business services by hosting them in a Hybrid cloud environment and performing reverse migration from Amazon Managed Services to Microland Managed Services.

Leveraging Microland’s intelligeni CloudOps platform driven by IaC, Automated Configuration Management, and CI/CD pipelines, we modernized the client’s infrastructure to reduce manual intervention while ensuring adherence to regulatory authority mandated compliance norms.

Our engagement model covered the management of a complex cloud environment, consisting of VM’s, several CI/CD pipelines, storage, and integration with:

• 24x7x365 support with AWS Platform Management
• Vulnerability and Patch Management for their Critical National Infrastructure
• Release Management, Availability, and Capacity Management
• Single window platform led SCADA management to enable operations data-based analytical decisions

Outcomes

Microland delivered services from Microland’s ISO27001 accredited digital hubs which resulted in: