After acquiring another business, sometimes it’s necessary to consolidate on a single cloud provider.

Arbor Education are a UK provider of SaaS to educational institutions. Their products are Management Information Systems (MIS), targeting primary and secondary schools across the country. These systems, built on AWS, help customers manage all aspects of running a school, such as taking attendance, communicating with parents, or managing seating plans.

As part of a plan for growth, Arbor’s parent company The Key Group, have acquired a number of other businesses. In 2023, they acquired a competing suite of services called Integris MIS. This platform originally ran on a different cloud provider’s platform, but Arbor were keen to consolidate the acquired systems onto AWS, the platform they’re most comfortable with.

The Scale Factory has worked with Arbor since 2021, so we were an obvious choice to help with their migration.

Assessment

We ran discovery workshops with Arbor’s team in order to identify the assets that could be migrated.

We identified that they’d benefit from efficiency improvements from having all customers on a single cloud platform, and that this would drive down costs through reduced operational complexity. Further, they’d be freed from the burden of Microsoft licensing costs.

Rather than migrating applications over as-is, in a lift-and-shift model, we determined that the best course of action was to “rehost” the applications by performing a bulk data migration, bringing data from Integris MIS into Arbor’s MIS, and then provisioning new AWS resources to support operating the Arbor MIS at larger scale.

We built a 3 year cost model for the target solution in order to prove the business case for this work.

Mobilise & Migrate

With funding from the AWS Migration Acceleration Program, we genuinely shortened the timelines on this migration project.

Using infrastructure as code tools, we provisioned new resources for the target system, based on a capacity model built to incorporate new customers. The new infrastructure was based around AWS Fargate and Amazon Aurora to provide maximum scalability and flexibility.

Along with Arbor’s team, we successfully migrated data into AWS, initially replicating the data between systems, then finally migrating using ETL processes after validating that the data was correct.

We kept customers informed of the migration process at all times, so as to avoid any unpleasant surprises.

Customer Outcome

Arbor Education have achieved their goal of consolidating their workloads on AWS. This has reduced their total cost of ownership and they’ll benefit from significant savings in the long run.

The existing platform had limited scaling and suffered from performance issues, which have now been solved as part of their migration to AWS.

“The Scale Factory were proactive in helping us achieve our business goals, whilst also saving money”, said Austen Constable, VP of Platform at Arbor. “They’re technically knowledgeable, and all round nice people to work with”.