VODAFONE Delivering critical cloud infrastructure against all the odds

The 2020 Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS) audit presented significant challenges to Vodafone’s existing data centre infrastructure solution.

Meeting that challenge by migrating key .co.uk data and services to AWS would offer attractive cost savings and prepare the ground for future infrastructure improvements. However, re-integrating migrated data and services with retained on-premise data and services would add significant complexity to the project.

Failing to successfully meet the audit deadline would leave Vodafone unable to trade online until compliant and with the project running six months behind schedule, Vodafone’s project team doubted their ability to deliver. Due to our technical leadership and cloud infrastructure expertise, MMT Digital was tasked with turning things around.

A one week technical audit revealed where improvements to project governance and code quality could be made. Setting clear goals, prioritising tasks, freeing up developer time and building a one team culture quickly got the project back on track.

Refactoring the codebase to be more modular allowed increased frequency of independent deployments. Automation improvements allowed test environments to be built 30 times faster than was previously possible.

Implementation of a future proof modular hybrid cloud architecture - built using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - allowed the project team to successfully complete the migration and re-integrate new AWS data and services with legacy on-premise systems.

Meeting the PCI audit deadline allowed Vodafone to continue trading online without interruption. Following the decommission of redundant data centre servers, Vodafone expect to make an annual cost saving on infrastructure, power and maintenance of up to £700,000 per year.