Program Overview
The Azure Migration Program has made significant strides this year in advancing UW-IT’s five-year Cloud Strategy, with a focus on security, scalability, operational resilience, innovation through strategic cloud transformation, and cost reduction in alignment with Technology Stewardship and Optimization and Together We Thrive.
Key Achievements
Strategic Alignment & Business Impact
- Successfully aligned program initiatives with both the Cloud Strategy and Together We Thrive strategy
- Secured executive approval for foundational investments, including the $220K Unisys Assessment and Migration Plan
Operational Progress
- Completed migration of more than 250 SQL 2012 databases, with remaining workloads to be migrated through the remainder of the calendar year.
- Advanced beyond traditional “lift and shift” approaches to implement thoughtful workload right-sizing and optimization, delivering trusted solutions following Microsoft best practices for cloud adoption
- Initiated systematic deprecation of outdated technologies while maintaining service continuity
- Established proactive migration methodologies to reduce technical debt accumulation
- Implementing Azure solutions using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to ensure reliable and efficient delivery
- Delivered comprehensive Agile methodology training through CPP unit to enhance team visibility, prioritization, customer engagement, balance workloads and address reliance on superheroes
Collaboration & Team Building
- Built strong cross-functional partnerships across UW-IT divisions and units including Data & Applications, Identity and Access Management, Networking, Information Security, and within our own Computing and Productivity Platform service teams
- Successfully engaged diverse customer teams including Astra, Administrative Systems, HR & Payroll Integrations, Enterprise Data Warehouse, and Enterprise Web Services
- Extended collaboration to university-wide partners including Continuum College, Graduate School, and ORIS, building on UW-IT’s strategic anchor of You Get Me Relationships
- Recognized contributions from over 30 individual team members across multiple departments
Next Steps
- Revise program timeline with achievable goals based on lessons learned during migration of servers from the shared infrastructure. Revised dates include:
- Completing migration of shared infrastructure (60 servers total, with the majority of these having been migrated)
- Migration of UNIX servers (450 servers)
- Migration of MCP resources (21 servers).
- Establish pattern-development deliverables to prevent timeline slippage
- Create reusable IaC to accelerate delivery and ensure that best practices are sustained.
Impact
Customer engagement before, during, and after migration is key to the success of the Azure Migration Program. Learning from prior migration efforts in years past, the team ensures that customers are as involved as they want to be throughout the process. From playbook design to stand-up calls to post-migration surveys, the AMP leads adapt to each customer group’s preferences and level of technical interest, savvy, and comfort.
Successful customer engagement doesn’t end when migration is finished. The program’s post-migration outreach includes conversations, chats, and a five-question survey asking customers about their experience of support, communication and coordination, and features, functionality and performance of migrated applications and/or services, providing an opportunity for customers to share improvements and concerns. Here are some of the comments we’ve received:
- “We have never done a change managed this well.” – ASTRA
- “The support we received was exceptional.” – Enterprise Data Warehouse
- “Thank you for your continued leadership on this.” – Office of Research and Information Services
- “This was very painless and smooth.” – The Graduate School
Bart Pietrzack, AVP of UW-IT’s Data & Applications division shared the following kudos: “This migration was a pivotal step in modernizing the way we work. The servers migrated are crucial for delivering accurate, up-to-date student data to critical systems, including enrollment reporting and learning platform integrations. The work