Microland modernized cloud operations for the UK’s second-largest gas distributor leveraging Intelligeni CloudOps and achieved a 25% reduction in operational costs

Overview:

Microland's client, a UK-based gas distribution company catering to the energy needs of 5.9 million households and businesses in Scotland and England through natural and green gas, managing over 44,000 kilometers of gas pipelines. Microland by transitioning its cloud services to a hybrid environment, mitigated over 26,000 vulnerabilities, enhancing operational efficiency and regulatory compliance with customizable AWS support thereby reducing TCO costs by 25%.

Business Challenge:

The client was struggling with an aging IT infrastructure that was unable to support their increasingly demanding utilities infrastructure to keep pace with evolving regulatory requirements and ever-rising customer expectations. The environment was complex, and lacked visibility and control, thereby intensifying operational inefficiencies, with low patching compliance and numerous unresolved vulnerabilities, exposing the national critical infrastructure to cybersecurity threats with the weak security posture.

Initially, a tier-1 global system integrator, one of their incumbent technology service providers, was managing the cloud operations program on AWS using Amazon Managed Services (AMS). This approach resulted in cost-heavy services for the client with minimal outcomes and a high impact on the business operations, leading to project cost overruns exceeding £10M. The client sought to migrate their cloud instances from AMS to a more cost-efficient service and cloud operations model, a transition the incumbent GSI struggled to implement. The provider's failure to adopt new technologies left the client without essential business solutions. Additionally, the infrastructure did not support third-party agents for metric data collection, further impeding the client's ability to maintain a secure and efficient IT system. Consequently, the client decided to issue a transformation RFP to address these challenges.

Solution:

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

The transition was intricate, as the cutover process differed from standard transitions, involving a strict 25-day off-boarding process from AWS. So, the complete transition, offboarding from the incumbent provider and onboarding to Microland Managed Services had to be planned with those timelines in mind, ensuring that there is minimal disruption to the client’s business operations and its 5.9 million end-customers.

A thorough examination of the current environment, access, automation, deployment, and services provided by AWS Managed Service to identify potential challenges and risks. This enabled Microland to create a detailed, customized phase-wise transition plan that minimizes any possible disruptions during the process.

Leveraging Microland’s Intelligeni CloudOps platform driven by Bots-based Automation, IaC-based Automated Configuration Management, and CI/CD pipelines, to modernize the client’s infrastructure, automating the remediation, vulnerability patching and change process to accelerate remediation and 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 VMs, 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
• Highly customizable personalized AWS support for adding/removing new services, quick deployment of new infrastructure, and supporting developer teams for testing and deployments.

Outcomes:

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

• 25% reduction in operating costs to meet GD2 requirements imposed by Ofgem for price control
• Mitigation of 26,000+ vulnerabilities in the environment.
• Highly customizable personalized AWS support for adding/removing new services, quick deployment of new infrastructure, and supporting developer teams for testing and deployments.