PHI Helipass

The company’s core services are powered by Oracle databases, which were running in an on-premises data center that the company shared with PHI Group Inc. However, as the business continued to grow, PHI Helipass needed an IT environment that could scale with demand.

“PHI Helipass is innovating at such a fast pace that our existing on-premises infrastructure could not keep up, never mind support our goals for international expansion,” said Lauren Bergeron, project manager at PHI Helipass. “We needed a scalable environment that would be available to us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Moving to Azure Infrastructure would allow us to do that and take the next steps in our growth as a business.”

Given that much of the company’s core infrastructure is Microsoft-centric, choosing the cloud provider was an easy decision—Microsoft® Azure®. Getting there, however, was more complex.

“We chose to work with Navisite because of the team’s demonstrated cloud expertise and experience migrating Oracle systems to the cloud,” said Bergeron. “They were confident in their ability to complete the migration on schedule, and given our team’s experience working with Navisite at PHI Group Inc., we knew they were the right partner for this project. We also liked the fact that Navisite has a strong global presence with capabilities that could support us internationally.”

Navisite worked closely with the PHI Helipass team to develop a two-phased migration strategy. The initial move involved a “lift and shift” of all web services and applications running on three on-premises Oracle databases to Windows Servers on Azure. Phase two, a longer-term initiative, will focus on moving off Oracle databases entirely by refactoring to Azure Infrastructure.

For phase one, Navisite conducted a comprehensive pre-migration assessment of PHI Helipass’ existing IT estate—including a detailed cost analysis and architecture landing zone schematic that outlined the migration of Oracle workloads from the data center to IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (platform as a service) environments on Azure, along with the technical requirements and timeline. Following the assessment, Navisite focused on developing the environment, which consisted of building Microsoft® Windows® VMs in Azure and installing and configuring Oracle web services and databases. Navisite then worked with PHI Helipass to perform pre-production proof-of-concept (POC) testing to ensure the Oracle databases would run as expected and meet specified performance criteria. Once the performance was validated, Navisite began the migration process.

“Navisite brought a fresh perspective and the Azure migration expertise we needed to ensure continuity of services, performance and redundancy,” said Bergeron. “Not only did they appropriately scope the project and costs involved, they executed on the migration quickly.”

Now that PHI Helipass has successfully moved to Azure, the company and its customers are experiencing faster performance speeds, increased availability and easier scalability. Additionally, the public cloud will enable the company to innovate much faster than was possible on legacy infrastructure, as well as scale to meet new demands and international growth.

“Migrations are an involved process, but the team executed our project seamlessly and exceeded expectations,” said Bergeron. “PHI Helipass was looking for a partner that had the same vision for growth as our team does, and we found that partner in Navisite. We look forward to working with them as we move into phase two of our migration and look to take advantage of cloud-native tools and technologies on Azure.”