Watpac Partners with Idea 11 on a Migration to AWS Public Cloud
About Watpac:
Watpac is one of Australia’s leading construction companies with over 30 years of growth and success. Renowned for some of Australia’s most iconic construction projects, Watpac is trusted to deliver large, complex projects and has a reputation for world-class innovation.
Watpac employs over 800 people across Australia and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of BESIX, one of the world's leading international construction companies.
Overview
Watpac is one of Australia’s leading construction companies with over 30 years of growth and success. Renowned for some of Australia’s most iconic construction projects, Watpac is trusted to deliver large, complex projects and has a reputation for world-class innovation.
Watpac employs over 800 people across Australia and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of BESIX, one of the world's leading international construction companies. As the company continues to evolve and grow in size and capability, Watpac felt increasingly limited by its legacy and traditional IT infrastructure.
A high risk of service loss and business disruption, and the high-cost of private cloud and on-premises infrastructure, led Watpac to explore for a better way to deliver and maintain the technology that drives their business.
Challenges
Service loss
High risk of service loss and business disruption due to end-of-life hardware and software, with no immediate path to re-architect or upgrade the solutions.
Inefficiencies
Non-scalable and inefficient infrastructure that if left unaddressed would hinder scalability with Watpac’s business growth, and prevent it from innovating with new technologies.
High on-premise costs
High cost of on-premises and private cloud infrastructure that was redirecting spend away from improvement and innovation opportunities to just ‘keeping the lights on’.
Our data centre migration was not just about infrastructure and workloads; it was also about finding a long-term partner with deep expertise to help us manage the new environment. I believe we have found that long-term partner and we treat Idea 11 as an extension of our team. "
Marc McCready
Chief Information Officer, Watpac
The Solution
When Watpac explored the market to find a path forward for its infrastructure upgrade program, Idea 11 recommended a cloud-first strategy based on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world's leading public cloud platform.
A migration to AWS would not only reduce business risks by moving Watpac to a more resilient and secure IT environment, but would also empower the company to focus on its core business, future-proof its technology environment, and maintain its competitive edge.
Together, Watpac and Idea 11 commenced an extensive environment assessment to capture a thorough understanding of the technology in use across the business and the pain points today. With this background, Idea 11’s team was then able to design a cloud architecture that would overhaul Watpac’s traditional infrastructure into a cloud-first environment.
The new cloud architecture, based on AWS, was designed to provide a high-performance, scalable and reliable platform that would deliver against Watpac’s requirements while remaining agile to future demands and innovation.
As part of the design, Idea 11 tailored Watpac’s compute and storage architecture around Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) in combination with low cost Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The tailored design enabled Watpac to implement lifecycle policies to automatically move data from high-performance storage to low-cost storage once the data had reached a certain point in its lifecycle, providing increased cost optimisation from the outset.
With an architecture set and the core environment built, Watpac formed an internal project team that Idea 11 became a major part of. A methodical migration approach was then implemented to re-host and re-platform Watpac’s workloads and applications into the new environment. Strong collaboration between the Watpac and Idea 11 teams ensured minimal business impact while the migration completed successfully.
Watpac’s new cloud architecture delivers the much-needed scalability, improved security, and cost-effectiveness while enhancing Watpac’s ability to accommodate a changing business and to deliver new innovative opportunities.
Outcomes and benefits
Reduced IT costs and a transition to an operational expenditure model frees up capital.
Reduced risk of operational disruption due to the failure of the on-premise data centre.
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A cloud architecture has improved performance, scalability, resiliency, agility and security across IT services.
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Increase of infrastructure availability to 99.93%.
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Mission-critical workloads are now protected with increased disaster recovery capabilities to ensure business continuity. Cloud services have delivered a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) as low as 1 hour and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes.
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Innovation opportunities such as forms automation and data and analytics have already been delivered through the power of the AWS platform.
About Idea 11:
Idea 11 is an award-winning, full-stack AWS IT company that specialises in digital transformations, cloud infrastructure, software development and managed services.
We're recognised for our fresh approach to being a technology partner. We help our customers solve the challenges of today, envision their future and make it real. Our strong values, personal client relationships and long-term thinking makes us unique.
