A global leader in business data and analytics, this organization has 5,000 employees worldwide and provides invaluable insights into commercial credit, risk management, and sales acceleration.

With a vast database that covers almost a quarter of a million companies worldwide, including 90% of the Fortune 500, this firm plays a crucial role in facilitating global business transactions and partnerships.  In 2019, the business was acquired by a consortium of investors, shifting it to private ownership under a new leadership team. Since then, it has focused on modernization and cost savings, adopting a cloud-first approach to enhance speed, agility, and innovation.

Despite making significant progress in migrating workloads to the cloud already, the client still retained some infrastructure in an aging data center. As the last tenant in the facility, the client faced high lease costs, making continued occupancy financially unviable. The client had a substantial contractual spend with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) but lacked the necessary workloads in the cloud to meet its commitment.

Another service provider had previously attempted a data exit, but after six months only 20 workloads had been moved (at a high cost), making the need for an effective solution even more pressing.

Ensono has been an ally to this client for twenty years, successfully delivering several cost-saving initiatives including the optimization of servers, the network, and mainframe environment, as well as a cloud migration that saved over $100 million over five years. Given our history and strong relationship, Ensono was trusted to navigate the complexities of this final data center exit.

Leveraging our deep knowledge of the client’s IT environment, Ensono identified which workloads should be migrated to GCP to optimize cloud spend and which should remain on the mainframe (these were migrated to Ensono’s Kings Mountain data center).

To accelerate the project, Ensono developed a real-time progress-tracking dashboard that gave the CIO full visibility of project progress so that he could align his infrastructure and application teams from the outset.

The data center exit was successfully completed within fifteen months and a week ahead of schedule. As a result, the client avoided further financial burdens associated with the legacy data center lease and was able to meet its cloud spending commitment, ultimately optimizing its Google Cloud investment.

• 1,110 servers were successfully migrated
• 137 applications were transitioned to the new infrastructure
• 420 servers were upgraded to modern operating systems
• 228 servers were reconfigured for domain transition to DNBAPP.net

As a result of this successful data center exit, the client has:

• Aligned its IT strategyto the long-term business strategy
• Modernized its IT environment by embracing cloud solutions to reduce risk and enhance speed, agility and the ability to innovate
• Increased CGP consumption to meet its cloud spend commitment
• Avoided an increase in legacy data center leasing costs

Thanks to this successful transition, the client is now even better positioned to continue modernizing its IT landscape and delivering innovative services and solutions to its customers. Ensono remains a trusted ally, supporting ongoing cloud optimization and future strategic initiatives, including mainframe modernization and further cloud adoption.