Challenge

PODS wanted to migrate its legacy applications to the cloud and embrace automation to transform the way it did business.

A leading provider of storage and moving services, PODS was committed to making it easy for people to move and store things. But it was constrained by its legacy on-premise IT infrastructure and manual processes that were slowing time to market and leading to poor documentation and other inefficiencies. To overcome these challenges, the client was looking to migrate its legacy systems to Microsoft Azure and adopt infrastructure and DevOps process automation. This would help optimize its systems and applications, and improve customer experience.

PODS needed a comprehensive plan to realize its goals. It needed a partner to help it better understand the complexities involved and dependencies on existing applications, and not just ensure a seamless transition to cloud, but also govern and manage its digital estate on cloud.

Solution

TCS helped PODS modernize its IT landscape with cloud, DevOps, and automation. 

PODS collaborated with TCS to build a strong cloud foundation.  

Together, we defined PODS’ cloud strategy and business case; designed a migration plan; and built its cloud environment on Microsoft Azure using Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and scalable, modular implementation options. 

Throughout, the focus was on ensuring a seamless migration of PODS’ legacy systems and applications to cloud with minimum disruption to business. To mitigate risks, we used the newly built cloud foundation as a testing ground for assessing the adaptability of legacy systems and applications to cloud. This helped in modernizing the systems and applications and optimizing them for cloud before moving them to the operational environment.  

Furthermore, TCS automated the creation of infrastructure including development, testing, and integration environments by moving to infrastructure as a code (IaC). This worked as a starting point for PODS to deploy workloads and launch applications dynamically. Through a DevOps platform that supports IaC, we enabled automated build and deployment of infrastructure without the need for manual provisioning, and standardized DevOps cloud deployment and automation with Terraform and PowerShell. The result is that today PODS can rapidly build custom workloads on cloud and deliver projects at speed.  

Benefits

PODS could now put greater focus on redesigning the experience around moving and storage for its customers. 

By migrating its systems and business applications to a modern, automated, and reliable platform on cloud, PODS gained the agility to innovate and remove complexities around moving, along with several other advantages:

• Annual savings from optimized development, testing, and integration environments. 

• Faster delivery of new projects as workloads could be created in just a few days, sometimes just hours.

• Higher scalability, agility, and reliability of applications with the Azure Cloud platform. 

• 50% reduction in running costs of test environments in Azure with the implementation of FinOps best practices. 

• Improved productivity through 80% reduction in efforts for environment provisioning and actionable alerts for business-critical applications.

• Faster, simpler, and consistent code deployment with better controls and monitoring.  

• Smarter decision making for effective project delivery, aided by documentation and analysis of third-party dependencies during the migration assessment.