While the client’s added regulatory requirements made the move to Azure more complex than some of the lifts and shifts we perform, Sunker’s job was made easier by
Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework.
“Using this framework,” explains Sunker,
“We were able to design a robust target architecture that met all their functional, performance and availability requirements.” These core requirements were as follows
Functional requirements: The client needed a deployment that was in line with PCIDSS, a key regulatory requirement in the financial services industry. Another major concern was “hybrid connectivity”: their agents needed to be able to access their applications from the cloud with very low latency. (Sunker says an easy way of understanding this is to think of the difference between dial-up internet and fibre.)
Availability requirements: They needed highly available backups and robust disaster recovery capabilities.,
Performance requirements: They needed a platform that was predictable in performance but also able to resize to handle changing load. Because Azure is elastic in nature the client is able to achieve this by fine tuning workloads from a compute perspective as needed.
After about a week of back-and-forth between BUI and the client, Sunker’s initial design was fine-tuned and approved. Now it was time to move on to the building phase…
