SHL is the global leader in HR technology and psychometric science, that leads to deeper insights that then helps companies craft powerful workforce solutions that drive business results. With more than forty years of powerhouse product launches, groundbreaking science, and business transformation, SHL continues to build on a long legacy of innovation and development.
Post divestiture in 2018, SHL saw a real opportunity to digitalise and future-proof the business. SHL decided to migrate all its services out of their data centres, and chose to adopt Amazon’s public cloud platform (AWS) over building their own data centres.
SHL’s wanted to provide services from locations that were close to their customers in order to decrease network latency, giving them a better overall experience. SHL decided to migrate workloads from geographically dispersed data centres to multiple AWS regions.
Additional drivers included a need to reduce Microsoft licensing costs, increase developer productivity, and reduce the time to market for new products and features. The business wanted to decouple monolithic application architectures and utilising AWS PaaS services and CI/CD tooling for increased agility wherever possible.
Nordcloud initially deployed an upskilling program, enabling the SHL team to discuss high-level migration approaches and strategies during migration workshops.
Nordcloud also undertook a deep-dive application review and assessment exercise, focussed on the key line of business applications, resulting in recommendations for optimised cloud operations.
Following stage 1, Nordcloud built out a core infrastructure in AWS, which acted as the “landing zone” for subsequent applications and services migrations. Nordcloud also provided shared services to support the roadmap of cloud application development activities.
With the landing zone in place globally, and a new CI/CD pipeline established by Nordcloud in collaboration with SHL’s developer teams, the mass migration of both production and non-production environments began in earnest, with Nordcloud migration specialists guiding and supporting SHL’s DevOps teams throughout the programme.
After the initial migrations, SHL tasked Nordcloud with the migration of discrete services, hosted in their Shanghai data centre to AWS regions in Beijing and Ningxia.
Using underlying expertise with AWS environmental differences between regions, Nordcloud designed and developed a tailored landing zone solution based on SHL’s standard architectures, with tailored design components. This catered for differences in service availability and scale.
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SHL successfully exited their data centres within the limited available time, and within budget tolerances.
SHL have improved their ways of working by adopting DevOps and Agile principles, reducing the time to market for new products, and significantly improving the velocity of feature release into the existing product set.
By using Nordcloud’s cost optimisation expertise, SHL have significantly reduced their post-migration AWS spend, unlocking budget for future innovations and new products to be built upon AWS native services.
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