Anglian Water data centre efficiency through cloud migration

Client Challenge: As part of their ongoing partnership, Anglian Water and Capgemini wanted to find ways to simplify the company’s data centre estate in order to reduce costs and architectural complexity.

Solution: The partners launched a review of the assets hosted in the existing data centre, which then enabled Anglian Water and Capgemini to perform a cloud migration to the Microsoft Azure platform.

Benefits:

• 50% reduction in assets hosted in the data centre
• Reduced data centre costs
• Greater simplicity as the result of a unified initiative
• Decreased carbon emissions due to transition from physical data centre

As digital technology only continues to become more sophisticated, companies across a variety of industries have grown increasingly capable of making substantial gains in efficiency. This means that any business that isn’t taking any opportunity available to find new outcomes for such improvement risks conceding a considerable advantage to its competitors.

This drive for efficiency inspired Anglian Water, the largest water company in England and Wales in terms of geographic area, to take another look at the data centre it established and managed in partnership with Capgemini. While the existing approach had fulfilled the company’s needs, the company could not afford to remain complacent. To that end, Anglian Water wanted to identify a method by which the costs associated with the data centre could be reduced.

After more than 12 years of partnership, Capgemini understood the organisation’s inner workings and its vision of the future. This positioned Anglian Water and Capgemini to launch a collaborative investigation into the various options available for achieving Anglian Water’s stated objectives.

Building a review process

Anglian Water selected the Microsoft Azure platform for this initiative, which would allow the project team to shift a variety of assets from the data centre, which would only host those applications that could not be effectively managed on the cloud platform. In this way, the organisations would lower costs while simultaneously reducing the complexity of the company’s application landscape.

However, success would not take the form of simply transitioning every asset from the data centre to Microsoft Azure. Instead, the project team set up a process by which every application was thoroughly reviewed and identified for rehosting, refactoring, retiring, or retaining. To do so, the partners utilised Capgemini’s Clear Sight IT Decision Maker (formerly known as eAPM), which scanned Anglian Water’s estate to gather data that could be used with a decision tree encompassing business rules and logic to determine the most effective approach with each asset.

Based on these data-based judgements, Anglian Water and Capgemini identified those applications that could be hosted on a cloud platform and performed the necessary migrations based on that analysis. Throughout this project, the companies utilised a scrum methodology rather than the more traditional waterfall approach associated with Azure DevOps.

Achieving efficiency and a process for the future

By the end of the process, Anglian Water, Capgemini, and Microsoft successfully migrated and retired 50% of the assets previously hosted in the data centre over to Azure. Not only did this cut costs but also provided the company with expanded insight into its application landscape and how to evolve it. This meant that this project went beyond a single delivery and instead provided an approach for chasing efficiency in the future.

Now with a simplified and more cost-efficient estate, Anglian Water is poised to maintain its leadership both within the industry and the UK market. Together, the company and Capgemini will continue their engagement, relying on a partnership built on mutual trust and autonomy to pursue future opportunities for innovation and improvement.

“Through our strategic collaboration and their proven ways of working, Capgemini were able to successfully support Anglian Water in streamlining our digital operations. Having halved our space in their data centres – significantly reducing costs and decreasing our carbon footprint – we are now well placed to realise our digital aspirations and strategic goals.”

Dave Martin
Director of Digital, Data and Technology