Case Study: Acceleration of Data Discovery - Six Degrees

About Six Degrees

Six Degrees is a leading secure cloud provider, with more than 15 years of experience serving 2,000+ customers across a broad range of industries including retail, manufacturing, financial services, legal and public sector.

Six Degrees’ depth of expertise is matched by its range of capabilities, as it goes beyond delivering the best cloud infrastructure in the UK to also help customers maximise their productivity and efficiency. From virtual desktop solutions, through connectivity products like SD-WAN, to its next generation voice, video and messaging services, Six Degrees supports customers on every step of their digital journey.

Combine that with industry-leading security capabilities and highly flexible commercial models, and Six Degrees goes beyond cloud to set organisations free to achieve and exceed their boldest aspirations, whatever those may be.

The challenge

Many of Six Degrees' clients are established companies whose IT estates have grown organically over time or through acquisitions. As a result they are inherently complex and detailed documentation needs to be maintained.

Normal discovery tooling only provides part of the information. Robert Grigsby, Six Degrees' Product and Engineering Director says, "We need to go deeper and understand our clients' application portfolios. Particularly things like how important an application is to the business, its status on the roadmap, data classifications and so on. This allows us to deliver high quality migration and modernisations."

Typically, this information can only be obtained from the application and infrastructure teams who support and maintain them. However, they are busy with lots of competing priorities and getting access to their time for participation in discovery sessions is difficult.

One client in the energy sector had an estate comprising 76 applications on 300 servers across 2 data centres. In use were several flavours of Linux and numerous Windows Servers running versions 2008 through to 2016.

How AppScore met the challenge

The AppScore platform provides a simple, standardised method to gather and centralise application information across all aspects including technical and non-technical data. By leveraging the capabilities of the platform, the AppScore Cloud Accelerator provided an efficient and scalable way to deliver the discovery and assessment phase of the engagement.

AppScore worked closely with the Six Degrees and client teams to process server and database information from a Movere assessment, which was ingested into the AppScore platform, and an application-centric view created.

AppScore then engaged directly with the client's business and technical support teams to profile the applications in the platform.

"Gaining access to application owners and support teams can be challenging but we have a tried and tested approach we use with the Cloud Accelerator that is proven to deliver," says Charlie Futcher, a co-founder of AppScore and Head of Delivery.

AppScore's Cloud Accelerator works to fixed timeframes to ensure that discovery and assessment doesn't run on and on.

At the conclusion of the Cloud Accelerator phase, Six Degrees had a complete and detailed view of the client’s infrastructure and application portfolio in AppScore to work from. This comprised a consistent set of server, database, interface and application information captured from the client. The applications were scored and assessed against the 6Rs and 7Rs models and accurate future run costs were forecasted at the application level with estimated transformation costs to deliver the change.

Robert commented, "The Cloud Accelerator enabled us to provide a rapid, efficient and accurate discovery and assessment service. This gave us a rich dataset from which to outline solution designs, create a proposed solution, and build detailed migration plans. By using AppScore's Cloud Accelerator it significantly reduced the amount of time our consultants had to spend gathering information. Instead, everything they needed was at their fingertips in the AppScore platform."