Warner Music Group

WMG is home to a collection of the best- known record labels in the music industry, as well as Warner Chappell Music, one of the world’s leading music publishers. In the fall of 2018, WMG’s new senior vice president of Global Infrastructure and Security, John Remo, was focused on evaluating opportunities for IT modernization while reducing costs. However, a second challenge soon emerged: WMG needed to move out of its Burbank, California, data center within just a few months.

The goal was to address both initiatives with one cohesive IT strategy that centered on moving to AWS, where WMG could take full advantage of the efficiencies and cost benefits of the public cloud. Getting there, however, would require the expertise of a trusted partner who could help navigate the time constraints and inherent complexities involved with moving legacy systems to the cloud.

Many of the systems housed in Burbank, including artist royalty calculation applications and financial and ERP systems, were running on Oracle databases and Solaris systems—which meant it would not be a simple “lift-and-shift” to the cloud. Applications would need to be refactored to run efficiently and make full use of the cloud-native features on AWS—a specialized skill set that WMG did not have in-house.

WMG evaluated several vendors before connecting with Navisite at the suggestion of AWS. Ultimately, the company chose to work with Navisite based on the team’s deep technical expertise, experience moving Oracle systems to the cloud and clear understanding of WMG’s challenges, timeline and objectives.

Without delay, the Navisite team got to work to achieve WMG’s objectives, providing a) a total cost of ownership (TCO) assessment to identify the right approach for migrating and optimizing WMG’s systems on AWS, b) a comprehensive migration plan tailored to WMG’s environment including resource requirements, and c) a disaster recovery plan that aligned with WMG’s recovery objectives (RPO/RTO).

Navisite’s strategy focused on prioritizing applications to achieve the optimal balance between business-critical applications that needed more time to be refactored, and easier-to-move applications that could provide “quick wins” for the IT team. In addition to managing the Burbank migration, Navisite also handled migrating distributed applications with on-premises subsets at other WMG data centers to AWS.

The result: WMG not only successfully migrated legacy systems out of the Burbank data center and onto AWS, but did it ahead of the deadline.

WMG is now taking full advantage of the benefits of moving to the public cloud. More than 110 application and database servers have been migrated to AWS and are running on upgraded software. And with greater optimization of these systems in the cloud, WMG is experiencing improved efficiencies, security and management of IT operations.

With the success of this migration, WMG is exploring additional projects with Navisite’s help, including similar migrations at its remaining data centers in the U.S. and U.K.