About Unifiedpost

Unifiedpost Group is a fintech company of +1300 employees, active in 30 countries and serving +980.000 clients by providing document management services – amongst others. The company is listed on Euronext Brussels and has a turnover of € 146 million.

It’s their mission to help customers structure communication with other enterprises by delivering convenient, smart, digital solutions to operate in administrative and financial ecosystems.

The Group’s secure, cloud-based platform empowers businesses by creating a space where this network can exist and deliver streamlined, real-time and automated business functions, from e-invoicing and payments processing, to working capital financing, e-identity solutions and more.

The Problem

As a result of many recent acquisitions, Unifiedpost Group had a very diverse landscape of applications, environments and infrastructure providers. Each brings its own challenges and it becomes harder and harder for the central IT team to structure, govern and manage all these different environments, as they all come with their own configuration and management requirements.

Different applications are deployed using local IT providers, which would require the central IT Operations team to get acquainted with all these different environments. Another challenge with such a diverse landscape is to keep everything aligned with the Group’s strict security policies, as each platform has different specifications and implementation details.

The Goal

The goal of the project was to migrate legacy workloads into Google Compute Engine while leveraging Cloud Managed Services where possible. And to bring all workloads across all entities to the same cloud platform, as these workloads were distributed over many local providers. 

Another goal was to have a uniform approach to IT Operations (e.g. Infrastructure as code, and a consistent way of managing backups and disaster recovery) and to consolidate all networking and security concerns, in order to simplify the management and maintenance. 

Migrating to Google Cloud would also allow Unifiedpost Group to benefit from quick wins, such as integrated logging and using managed services for their database systems.

The Solution

Most of Unifiedpost Group’s workloads were migrated to Google Cloud with a lift & shift approach, as it were traditional workloads with third party solutions that have specific system requirements.

Moving from traditional VMs into Compute Engine helped them to optimise the environment for cost and scale, relying on rightsizing recommendations and per-second billing.

Where possible, the Group and partner Devoteam G Cloud chose for Managed Services to rely on Google Cloud for reliability, scalability and more.

For example, migrating their SQL Server databases from self-managed Virtual Machines to Cloud SQL, helped Unifiedpost Group to gain quick wins in this area.

The Methodology

Unifiedpost Group migrated their workloads using Devoteam G Cloud’s recommended approach. With a project consisting of 3 phases, the first phase focussed on fully understanding the as-is situation, and collaborating with different engineering teams to design and architect the desired to-be situation. Using different discovery tools like Stratozone helped give a clear overview of the environment and understand the different dependencies in the existing workload landscape.

The second phase focussed on planning the actual migration in order to ensure maximum success. First, a validation of the migration runbook was executed using a pilot migration. 

The Pilot consisted of a few average workloads that were representable for the majority of systems. This made the team discover points where they could improve their migration strategy. As a consequence, the migration window could be optimized, lowering downtime, by ensuring the migration checklist was fully battle-tested with the pilot migration. 

Afterwards, as the third and final phase, systems were grouped according to the planning made in the second phase and the relevant servers were migrated in several waves, each wave focussing on a dedicated group of coherent infrastructure.

The Result

Thanks to the proper preparation and guidance from partner Devoteam G Cloud and by spending sufficient time on the Discovery and Planning phase of the project, the Migration phase went smoothly and Unifiedpost Group was able to migrate all workloads into Google Cloud within the desired timeframe of 5 months. Once live, they could immediately benefit from cost savings using sustained use discounts and committed use discounts, combined with VM scheduling. 

Furthermore, they could instantly rely on Google’s network capabilities to manage global load balancing to absorb any load, and other optimizations like Google-managed SSL certificates. Combined with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, this all lowers the time spent by the IT team on daily management, so they have more time available to work on the next innovation.

As a result, UnifiedPost Group now has a consistent way of running workloads belonging to different entities in the group, and can centrally manage all aspects of their business.