Northern Gas Networks case study

Northern Gas Networks is a utility provider that covers large cities like Newcastle, Leeds, Bradford and York and delivers gas to 6.7million people in the North of England, including rural areas such as North Yorkshire and Cumbria. The company employs around 2000 people.

Introduction

Moving to AWS cloud meant NGN needed to decommission their legacy storage solution. Due to statutory legalities, the old data needed to be accessible within their SAP environment. Using OpenText’s Archive Centre, Proceed successfully migrated all documents and created link table entries in AWS SAP. NGN has now completely removed the old data centre, achieving a reductions in infrastructure spend, and a leaner data environment.

Background

With a migration to AWS Cloud underway, the team at NGN needed to work towards the decommissioning of their legacy Accel document storage platform in their old data centre. Due to compliance issues and statutory legalities, the old data couldn’t just be disregarded, and so it would need to be migrated to their newly built OpenText platform in AWS.

Working with Proceed to manage the data

Having already worked with Proceed on previous projects, the team at NGN felt confident to embark on this challenge with them. The project consisted of a total Accel to OpenText migration. With compliance in mind, working with knowledgeable and experienced professionals meant they were able to work strategically to ensure documents that needed to be accessible to the business were available.

Working together to get results

Proceed worked closely with NGN and migrated documents from its Accel platform and integrated them within its SAP environment using OpenText located in the AWS cloud.

Reports were run to collect the relevant document information and file locations within SAP and Accel, these were then used to extract the legacy documents which Proceed migrated into the archive centre and created the link table entries in AWS SAP to maintain their integrity.

NGN was also able to remove more than half of its OpenText environment, reducing its servers from 17 to 5. This enabled the business to make significant savings.

Decommissioning Accel to save costs

The success of the project meant that NGN was able to decommission the Accel platform completely and remove it from the old datacentre, saving costs and happily moving away from a legacy solution to allow it to work better in the AWS cloud.

Proceed has worked with the team to decouple the archive server from other OpenText applications, working to change the architecture and configuration.

Paul Dodd, Technical Project Manager at Northern Gas Networks commented, “Working with Proceed on this project has been exceptional. Their commitment and dedication to succeed is impressive. Working closely with their consultants, we’ve been empowered to do many of the activities ourselves, which previously we found difficult. They’ve helped us fix and manage any ongoing issues and maintain the system to keep it running well. Throughout the project they went above and beyond to make sure the outcome was what we needed. I can’t recommend them highly enough.”

The project took a short time to complete, and the team now is able to give its business users access to data when required, within regulatory and compliance guidelines.

Working closely with Proceed, the company has achieved significant reduction in infrastructure spend, and has created a leaner data environment.