Moving On

Maintaining and upgrading IT systems is one of the most difficult challenges IT departments face today, but is an inevitability that all companies, at some point, must go through. Over the last few years, Citi has had to migrate hundreds of different applications in order to modernize its systems, and one of the hardest balances to maintain during this work was to ensure that functionality remained intact throughout. During the recent migration of a very large customer facing web application for Citi’s Global Consumer Group, the company deployed several strategies to maintain the legacy environment while building a new one. “We built a third environment,” explains Tony DiSanto, head of Citi’s North America Technology Infrastructure Group. “This allowed us to turn off the other environments as we were moving, and introduce a new level of hardware that enabled us to go to 64-byte operating systems.”

DiSanto recalls how having different environments was a big challenge for them during a migration process. Unfortunately for Citi, the company had at least four different environments for each application – including a production environment, a user acceptance test environment and a development environment. “During migration we use the most recent hardware and operating system levels that we can,” he continues. “This means we have to upgrade more than just the device being moved. We have to keep the production site in sync with the continuity of business side, and this in sync with the developer. So migration becomes a big challenge when you are moving as many things as we are.”

There are plenty of opportunities for mishaps, and full support and team working across departments and an in-depth understanding all the interdependencies that are taking place is essential. “The most important thing for a successful migration is the right level of senior management sponsorship,” says DiSanto. “We need to have our engineering, our infrastructure and our development organizations all online to meet the same objectives. We achieve this through very stringent program management. We try to mitigate as much technology risk as possible, which we do through working with our development partners and going through all the application interdependencies. System migration is more than just moving devices. In some cases, we have had to migrate a mainframe and the 200 servers that talk to the mainframe. We had to do this as one migration. Understanding the scope and interdependencies of a project is therefore key for us.”

Testing, testing

Continual testing at every stage is another key consideration, and Citi carries out a number of dry-runs in order to be sure there are no problems. “We build environments and test, then build and test, test, test,” he says. “Prior to the actual transition date, we go through a number of practice runs and make sure our end-users or business partners fully sign off on the migration before we start. On the actual day of migration we run a full script. The second we turn the application on, our customers can see it so we have to be very careful and over-test to make sure that everything runs smoothly.”

As such, it’s important for IT managers to choose technology that won’t go obsolete quickly and to make sure that future products can be easily integrated to the existing solutions. Many organizations have a system of classifying IT products to evaluate the stage they lie in their lifecycle, which will be useful to help signal when equipment needs to be upgraded or replaced. “One way of identifying the stage of a product is by determining the percentage cost of maintenance verses the cost of the product,” suggests DiSanto. “Another way is to look at the third-party vendor community and to see if they are still investing and developing software products for an operating system or have migrated to something new. If the industry is putting its development talent and tools on newer products, this often signals the end of new versions of older software.”

DiSanto offers the following advice. “I recommend having architectural roadmaps for the key critical components and partnering for your migration,” he says. “At Citi, we partner with our major technology providers, understand their directions and then build these into our plans where we can. Then as we migrate, we try to eliminate as much end-of-life or obsolete equipment as we can.”

Virtualization is one trend that is likely to grow in system migration over the next few years. This will allow for two improvements, according to DiSanto: “The greater utilization of certain types of devices is one, but the real reason is that creating virtual environments is significantly quicker than creating physical environments.” Furthermore, he predicts further utilization of industry-specific tools to build environments. “We’ll see a higher degree of automation, which will be beneficial as it will standardize the building of environments,” he adds.