The Instillery

How The Instillery & Lightwire was able to improve LIC's network stability.

Continuing on from our Livestock Improvement Corporation’s (LIC) customer success story, this edition focuses on how The Instillery, empowered by Lightwire Business, provided LIC with exceptional resiliency when connecting to business-critical cloud-based work applications.

A major objective for LIC's migration was to improve the stability of its network and remove all single points of failure. Watch the below customer success story to find out more.

Checking in with Sanford after their SD-WAN transformation.

It’s been two years since The Instillery partnered with Sanford to keep one of New Zealand’s largest seafood suppliers connected across the waves. We’re checking in with Sanford’s IT Operations Manager, Brad Watson, to see how things have progressed.

“Back in 2019, we found that our large and expensive traditional MPLS network was holding our business back. To ensure our network could keep up with our organisation’s velocity, we engaged The Instillery to migrate to a modern and stable SD-WAN solution. Two years on, The Instillery approached us with an opportunity to innovate again and we have just signed off the next phase of upgrades to our SD-WAN network with a migration to The Instillery’s Velocloud partner.”

“One of the reasons we chose The Instillery was because their approach to innovation meant they would never stop seeking ways to improve our network, even after it had gone live. We have more than 600 employees across Aotearoa, including some in the most remote areas, therefore parts of our network are outside the range of ultra-fast broadband or decent mobile services. The Instillery knows how important keeping all our staff connected is to us. Several months after our SD-WAN network launched, The Instillery enabled Sanford to leverage leading-edge satellite internet technology to boost connectivity in our remote sites, and now we are seeing speeds of 200mb/s+ in some of our most rural areas of New Zealand, such as Stewart Island.”

“Our latest upgrade will see connectivity and stability further improve for our whole network without drastically increasing our costs. This commitment to finding innovative solutions to do better for their customers is what is most refreshing about The Instillery. Two years ago, our network was slowing our business down. Today, it is ahead of the curve.”

Loyalty NZ is a marketing, loyalty and data analytics consulting firm who, for the last two and half decades, has specialised in using data to help NZ businesses discover more about their customers so they can build long-lasting and meaningful relationships with them. Loyalty NZ’s two brands - Flybuys and Lab360 - allow them to incorporate NZ’s favourite loyalty programme with the richest customer dataset in the country, all under one roof. 

The Opportunity After 25 years of enabling New Zealand businesses to understand their customers better, Loyalty NZ’s infrastructure had naturally evolved into a complex blend of native cloud services and legacy on-prem data centres. Having begun to leverage cloud services in 201Ā, Loyalty NZ’s hybrid approach of combining cloud platforms with ageing legacy technology was creating significant operational complexity and technical debt. With its infrastructure negatively impacting operational efficiency and customer experience, as well as lacking comprehensive recovery capability against natural disasters, Loyalty NZ understood that a large-scale modernisation project was required to future-proof its business. The projected cost of upgrading the underlying technology in its data centres was nothing short of eye-watering, so Loyalty NZ set out to continue its cloud transformation journey by retiring its legacy on-premise infrastructure entirely. The Solution As Loyalty NZ was seeking to migrate away from large data centres and streamline and enhance their existing cloud services whilst ensuring its core systems continued to be stable, secure and accessible, this project represented a significant risk. To address this, we began with comprehensive consultation and deliberation to find a solution that would meet Loyalty NZ’s requirements and simultaneously de-risk them. Although Loyalty NZ had already begun to use cloud services, their dependency on their existing network meant that we had to find a solution that was somewhere between the two. We landed on a transformation roadmap that would see Loyalty NZ migrate away from their data centres to VMware Cloud (VMC) and, once de-risked, eventually move to native AWS with a full modernisation programme. VMC was selected as it did not require rebuilding Loyalty NZ’s architecture which meant that we could use a lift-and-shift approach enabling Loyalty NZ to utilise its existing network, significantly reducing risk in the process. VMC was also well established in AWS and had a disaster recovery product, VMCDR, that would work out of the box.

Migration to AWS
Challenge Tuatahi First Fibre (TFF) was leveraging a legacy Infrastructure-as-a-service platform for 45 critical workloads when they received end-of-life notice from their provider and a deadline for migrating to a new platform. Solution With such a tight deadline, Tuatahi First Fibre engaged The Instillery to lead their migration to AWS from start to finish with The Instillery’s co-pilot approach enabling TFF’s team to be closely involved throughout the process. After working with TFF to understand their existing workloads and business requirements for a future AWS environment, The Instillery designed and built a best-practice AWS Landing Zone that was consistent with the AWS Well-Architected Framework prior to any workloads being migrated. After the initial Cloud Discovery, Landing Zone build and migration planning, the AWS Migration itself took just four weeks to complete. Result By enabling The Instillery to take the lead with the migration, moving Tuatahi First Fibre from a legacy datacentre to an AWS environment was completed well within their target time frame which prevented any service interruption to their business-critical workloads. Migrating to AWS also enabled TFF to increase the resiliency and redundancy of their infrastructure by leveraging multiple availability zones. Initial cost savings that resulted from this migration project were impressive but The Instillery was able to further reduce Tuatahi First Fibre’s costs by utilising AWS’s Savings Plan. With their workloads hosted in the Cloud, TFF could now turn their attention to higher-value modernisation and innovation projects to further improve their customer experiences and more. 

Solution Cloud Discovery, Cloud Landing Zone, Cloud Migration Results Successful migration to AWS Cloud within agreed time frame Increased infrastructure resiliency and redundancy Significant cost savings

Natural Hazards Commission Cloud Optimisation

The Opportunity The Natural Hazards Commission (NHC) were strategically focused on optimising operational costs and improving cloud infrastructure efficiencies. Their goal was to enhance performance, strengthen security, and reduce expenses while aligning with public sector benchmarks for digital innovation. The Solution NHC engaged The Instillery to lead a comprehensive cloud optimisation initiative. The Instillery implemented a multi-faceted approach:

1. Codebase Restructuring: Dramatically optimised NHC's codebase to enhance maintainability and performance.

2. Cloud Service Transition: Migrated from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS) for improved security and cost-efficiency.

3. Dynamic Resource Management: Implemented a flexible, on-demand service model.

4. Proactive Cost Management: Employed strategic Azure cost management practices. The Results The partnership between NHC and The Instillery yielded impressive outcomes, which included:

● 85% reduction in codebase size while improving maintainability and performance
● 35% decrease in data platform expenses since 2022
● Enhanced security through the transition to PaaS
● Implementation of a dynamic, on-demand service model
● Alignment with strategic goals for efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the public sector These results not only demonstrated significant cost savings but also positioned NHC for future technological innovations.