Visy is a leading packaging and recycling company with more than 120 locations across Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Founded in 1948 in Melbourne, they manufacture corrugated cardboard boxes and has more than 5,500 employees across Asia, Europe, and the United States. Apart from manufacturing a wide variety of packaging products, Visy recycles more than a million tons of paper and cardboard, and hundreds of thousands of tons of glass and plastic.

Since 2009, Visy has been using Telstra cloud platforms with infrastructure and applications residing on the Telstra CSD1 cloud platforms and co-location data centres. They needed to migrate their server infrastructure to a public cloud due to the CSD1 platform nearing its end of life. Visy required a public cloud that offered high availability, disaster recovery, and backup/restore capability. They also needed a safe landing zone as the target for their immediate migrations, as well as for ongoing management and future deployments.

Visy’s server infrastructure set for migration consisted of virtualised servers running on VMWare hosts, with Window and Linux operating systems. These servers hosted a range of application workloads including SAP, Biztalk, SQL Server, SharePoint, Citrix, Hyperion, Kronos and other applications.

Visy decided to migrate their infrastructure and workloads from Telstra’s internal private cloud CSD1 to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment, which involved architecting and building a best practice cloud environment.

Telstra Purple’s managed services solution for Visy included support for the Cloud Infrastructure and Guest Server Operating Systems, delivered through tools for patch management, anti-virus management, backup, monitoring, and logging. Experts from Telstra Purple supported all aspects of Visy’s infrastructure for migration to the new AWS environment.

The Telstra Purple Managed AWS Platform provides Visy with:

• Performance – Visy’s applications can now be deployed on high-performance infrastructure including networking, compute and storage, in line with offerings from market-leading cloud providers.
• Elasticity – Infrastructure resources can be provisioned, decommissioned, upgraded or downgraded with minimal effort and time.
• Continuity – Infrastructure and applications can be deployed with robust High Availability, Disaster Recovery and Backup/Restore capability.
• Security - Alignment with AWS security best practices
• Connectivity - Connectivity can occur between infrastructure deployed within AWS, CSX, CSD1, Telstra CoLo or on-premises

Solution

Telstra Purple worked closely with Visy to review their existing environment, design a new AWS platform, and migrate server and database workloads into the new platform.

The Visy AWS migration project consisted of:

1. Migration Scoping Workshop 
2. Planning and Design phase 
3. Platform Build and migration of pilot application workload 
4. Multiple migration phases of various application workloads

Transition phase comprised of these readiness activities: 

• Environment review/familiarisation]
• Development of a base Service Delivery Manual
• Transition to Telstra Purple Managed Services
• Telstra Purple Managed Services (BAU)

The engagement delivered the AWS Managed Cloud Platform, which hosts the migrated workloads. The environment is used as the active management platform for providing the current Telstra Purple cloud managed service over the infrastructure for the initial and all future workload migrations.

More recently, Telstra Purple and Visy performed a Well-Architected Review (WAR) and associated workshops as part of the continuous improvement program aimed at uplifting their AWS architecture and utilisation.

The WAR focused on the assessment of processes, policies and future objectives looking at the operational activities and design patterns of their AWS environment. The review identified the need to ensure that the continuous improvement activities around their AWS environment to deliver ongoing optimisation and improvements.

Outcome

The engagement provided a holistic approach to maintaining a Well-Architected environment, specifically on leveraging more cloud-native tooling to help reduce risk and increase agility within the environment and the teams leveraging it.

To continue ensuring the best outcomes for Visy, Telstra Purple focused on the following areas within the business:

Workforce training. Regular workshops and training sessions for IT and business personnel around new AWS technologies, products, services, and overarching industry trends. This helps upskill the Visy team and enables them to do more with less.

Application Modernisation. With the initial transition to AWS being focussed primarily on EC2 instances, Visy can now transform some of their workloads to leverage more cloud-native and platform-focused technologies such as EKS, Lambda, DynamoDB, and RDS.

Templating, Automation and Playbooks. Visy and Telstra Purple teams can collaborate to develop and leverage repeatable blueprints and templates, improving consistency across the Visy IT stack while also reducing the time to market for the team. Telstra Purple has helped kick-start this process by providing Visy access to templates and blueprints created over the years.

Monitoring and Dashboarding. With the adoption of more cloud-native products and services, an opportunity presented itself to enable greater visibility into the health and effectiveness of individual workloads/applications. Application-aware monitoring enables greater clarity and a more accurate viewpoint of the overall health of the Visy environment.

Through a collaborative process that brought together the best of Visy and Telstra Purple, the packaging manufacturer now has a secure and well-maintained cloud platform to expand on, enabling ongoing innovation and cost-optimisation.