Energy and Utilities
US energy infrastructure giant reduces outages by over 57% with IT modernization
Summary
Our client is a Fortune 500 energy infrastructure company headquartered in San Diego, California. They deliver energy with purpose to approximately 40 million consumers worldwide.
The client owns four major businesses under its umbrella: an energy infrastructure company, the largest natural gas distribution utility in the US, an electric and natural gas utility and a utility with the largest electric distribution and transmission system in California.
The company is committed to delivering sustainable energy solutions that meet the needs of its customers and the environment. The company is investing in a variety of renewable energy projects, including solar, wind and geothermal power. The company is also working to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and develop carbon capture and storage technologies.
HCLTech helped establish their digital foundation by enabling innovation and improving service reliability and customer engagement, leading to better shareholder value and regulatory compliance. Most importantly, we focused on helping them meet sustainability goals and transition to a more sustainable future.
The Challenge
Lacked a resilient digital foundation and reliable technology stack
To support our client's digital journey of energy transition and reducing technology debt, the company looked to build a more resilient business, support innovation, engage and connect with customers in new ways and improve the efficiency of operations.
The Objective
IT optimization, synergy between IT and business teams and improved cybersecurity posture
The major objectives of this journey aim to modernize IT for the future by creating an on-premises private cloud environment that eliminates significant technology debt while driving reliability and agility, decreasing costs and reducing risk.
The goal is to create strong disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plan (BCP) capabilities for all business applications, enable a stronger cybersecurity posture by creating a highly secure environment, leverage micro-segmentation to prevent security breaches from gaining widespread access and reskill infrastructure teams to behave in more cloud-like manners. These objectives deliver the foundation for the move to hybrid cloud environments.
The Solution
End-to-end infrastructure services migration, modernization and support
HCLTech provided a complete migration factory covering all infrastructure services related to building the platform and migrating applications. We also implemented new tools to manage the platform and deliver DR and BCP recovery services, including automated building of all virtual servers.
We also facilitated the transformation of current legacy HCI/CI (Nutanix and Dell/Pure) platforms to new technology (Dell VX Block and Rack) in primary and secondary data centers and migrated applications to the new platform before decommissioning unused infrastructure assets.
In addition, we delivered the foundation for the move to hybrid cloud environments while testing and confirming DR capabilities for Tier 1 and Tier 2 business applications.
At peak, HCLTech deployed more than 100 resources. The technology landscape for this project included Nutanix, Dell/Pure, Dell VX Block/Rack, VMWare, Zerto, Palo Alto, NSX, VRA, VRO and PowerMax.
The Impact
A stable foundation to support innovative digital solutions, now and in the future
By embarking on infrastructure virtualization, our customer was able to leverage these benefits to optimize their operations, enhance reliability, reduce costs, improve security and embrace technological advancements. Virtualization allowed them to modernize their infrastructure and adapt to the changing demands and challenges of the energy sector.
The major benefits included the modernization of infrastructure in IT data centers to improve stability and reduce the risk of outages.
- Disaster recovery testing goals for Tier 1 and Tier 2 applications were met with RPO of 60 minutes and RTO of 4 hours
- The servers can recover more quickly with built-in redundancy between the primary and secondary data centers
- The applications were better positioned to move to the cloud and deliver reductions in costs, maintenance and technical debt, while at the same time protecting the company and customer data against cyberattacks
The dedicated team worked 300,000+ hours with more than 900 stakeholders to produce these outstanding results, where 2,000+ new servers were built, 3,000+ servers were migrated, 900+ applications were migrated or decommissioned, 210 applications were successfully tested for disaster recovery (DR), 241 applications were made ready with approved DR plans and 144 applications with DR-enablement documents were completed.
This reduced outages by 57.44% and outage hours by 49.83%.
