The Pensions Regulator (TPR) is a public organization that oversees work-based pension plans in the United Kingdom. TPR promotes high standards of plan administration and works to ensure that the pension plan managers have the necessary skills and knowledge.
The Client has numerous goals, but its top priority is protecting members’ benefits. To that end, TPR takes a risk-based approach, concentrating resources on plans that pose the greatest risk to the security of members’ benefits.
“Qualitest’s expert consultancy and hands-on support have been crucial to the successful delivery of this business-critical program. . .”
– TPR IT Director
The Client was migrating 76 business applications and 47 servers and services from two physical sites to a cloud-hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Service (Iaas) solution. Their systems supported staff in multiple locations from a virtualized VMware environment hosted on physical servers, SAN Storage and Compute Services, which were managed inhouse.
The on-premise infrastructure was nearing obsolescence and did not support rapid change delivery. Maintenance and support were expensive, and contracts were due to expire in 12 months, making this a time-critical initiative.
TPR required migrating services including Server Compute, firewalls and balancers, VDI compute (Desktop-as-a-Service) and machine/file level backup. They needed a business assurance partner able to deliver a low-risk, iterative cloud migration in 12 months on a fixed budget.
After winning a competitive bid for the project, we designed, built and executed automated application testing to establish baseline tests for existing functionality. Our plan included performance benchmarking and verification of business continuity processes, plus oversight of penetration testing done by Client’s approved 3rd party.
The tests identified the performance characteristics pre-migration around a known set of users interacting with the applications in scope for each phase of migration. We ran the same tests post-migration to demonstrate a consistent end user experience and identify areas where the IaaS solution failed to deliver comparable performance.
As each migration phase was done, we expanded the automated regression pack to ensure that the subsequent migration phases didn’t have a detrimental effect on previously tested applications. We also rewrote and tested functionality of cloud-incompatible applications and planned, managed and supported ongoing User Acceptance Testing.
“TPR was able to transition to the Cloud within budget and with no business disruption or impact on their end users.”
Qualitest maintained control of quality throughout the five-phased migration and brought it to a successful end.
