Fortune 100 Accounting Firm Achieves Data Compliance by Moving from RDS to Tessell

The Company

This Fortune 100 company is a global leader in professional services, with operations in over 150 countries and a workforce of several hundred thousand professionals. Its commitment to sustainability and innovation is reflected in its continuous adoption of advanced technologies, which ensures that it delivers value to its clients and promotes ethical and responsible business practices across all its operations.

The Challenge

The company's primary application, used by hundreds of external customers, ran on Amazon RDS. In contrast, the vast majority of the company’s remaining IT landscape—approximately 95%—was hosted on Microsoft Azure. The company desired to move this database estate to Azure but was concerned that this move would necessitate the hiring of a dedicated team of full-time employees (FTEs), significantly increasing operational complexity and costs.

The Solution

Faced with this challenge, the company turned to Tessell. Tessell's unique offering provides the only platform to run Oracle in a fully managed database service natively in Azure. Tessell’s team moved quickly, executing a successful proof of concept (POC) within four weeks. Their holistic approach involved a series of comprehensive technical assessments that spanned database architecture, security, data management, and cloud integration. These assessments were designed to thoroughly understand the company’s specific requirements and develop a robust Oracle on Azure architecture that would seamlessly replace the existing AWS setup. 

Tessell’s proprietary “Lift & Shine” methodology guided the entire migration process, structured into three key phases:

• Discovery: Tessell began by capturing and analyzing the company’s application and data inventory. This phase was crucial in identifying the project's scope, determining timelines, and gathering detailed insights into the Oracle estate. With this information, Tessell proposed potential infrastructure solutions and mapped out a comprehensive migration strategy.
• Assessment: The customer success team at Tessell thoroughly reviewed the Automated Workload Repository (AWR) reports, which provided a deep understanding of the Oracle database's performance characteristics. Tessell then delivered a detailed TCO comparison, projecting significant cost savings across infrastructure, licensing, and third-party software, further reinforcing the advantages of migrating to Azure.
• Proof of Value (POV): Tessell facilitated the onboarding of the customer’s Azure subscription and established a secure and scalable landing zone, which included the formation of networks, implementation of security policies, and management of encryption keys. The team then performed an RMAN backup of the Oracle database from the RDS instance, securely transferred the backup files to Azure, and successfully restored the database in the customer’s resource group. This phase demonstrated the feasibility and value of the proposed solution, ensuring that the company’s critical data was securely and efficiently migrated to Azure.

The Results

The migration to Tessell’s Oracle PaaS on Azure delivered significant benefits. The customer is expected to realize savings of over 50% compared to their previous Oracle RDS instances, translating to more than $3 million in annual cost reductions. This move not only streamlined the management of their customer-facing solutions by aligning them with the company’s broader Azure-based IT infrastructure but also enhanced operational efficiency and reduced reliance on external support.

With the solution fully integrated into Azure, the company is well-positioned to explore migrating other critical databases to Azure, further consolidating their IT estate and unlocking new efficiencies across the organization.