In collaboration with our client, project phases of Pre-Migration, and Migration and Handover were defined. Rather than a big bang cutover, the approach was to provision the new Citrix FlexCast Management Architecture (FMA) infrastructure and deliver published applications incrementally over the migration period. To support the phased migration, old Citrix ICA and new Citrix FMA were setup side by side by integrating Storefront, NetScaler, Citrix receiver and supporting RDS licensing services. The FMA environment was commissioned and integrated to the existing environment, before compatible applications were migrated to delivery groups. An assessment was conducted of all components and the compatibility with the new environment.

Business application owners were notified of the project scope and the estimated timelines for the go-live date. Migration was scheduled by business load for each location, and applications that would not run on the new environment were identified within the first two months of the project. With a critical supply chain application involved, Diaxion was required to do advanced planning and schedule after-hours migration windows with roll back plans.
As-built documentation was given to the client to maintain the production environment and highlight disaster recovery considerations for the new Citrix environment.

Diaxion’s engagement followed a phased approach of Discovery, Analysis, Plan, and Exercise. In the Discovery phase, Diaxion undertook the work by reviewing documentation and conducting workshops. The initial  documentation requested covered various areas including current DR and BCP, recent Business Impact Assessment (BIA), DR charter, Crisis Management Plan, last DR and BCP exercises, and supporting documentation such as sequencing, system recovery, and service tiering.

After reviewing the documentation, Diaxion conducted workshops to confirm the desired target state for both DR and BCP, and to understand or confirm  current gaps. Diaxion also brought samples of different DR strategies, plans and runbook formats from previous engagements to facilitate alignment to the style best suited to the organisation. The workshops were held with key stakeholders across the business including risk and crisis managers, BIA process manager, operations manager, service owner, and solution design lead.

In the Analysis phase, Diaxion analysed capability gaps and determined how they could be best resolved; be that through technology, process improvement, 3rd party requirements, or people capability and capacity. Diaxion then identified an appropriate DR framework for the client and assessed them against it by considering how the framework would integrate into the existing Crisis Management Plan, the DR charter and triggers to be catered for, and the DR calendar. Diaxion also considered initial socialisation and ongoing project life cycle integration, training and testing for re-establishment, and how to test and mature the DR capability over a two year period.

The Plan phase saw Diaxion use the findings from the Analysis phase to create and update our client’s DR documentation. These documents included an overall DR strategy and plan, DR plans for each application and service, and a DR runbook. While the client was responsible for the construction of the plans and a further set of applications, Diaxion provided the supporting framework, explanation, oversight, assistance, and quality assurance review of one. Diaxion took a collaborative approach to review all documents, provide feedback and ensure consistency.
The final phase was run as a walk-through of the DR plans, where all relevant teams needed to confirm that the DR plans aligned sufficiently with the requirements and could realistically be implemented in the case of a disaster scenario. There were two review cycles which aimed to detect any technical or non-technical issues or concerns, and to inform the final DR documentation.

Diaxion’s engagement followed a phased approach of Discovery, Analysis, Plan, and Exercise. In the Discovery phase, Diaxion undertook the work by reviewing documentation and conducting workshops. The initial documentation requested covered various areas including current DR and BCP, recent Business Impact Assessment (BIA), DR charter, Crisis Management Plan, last DR and BCP exercises, and supporting documentation such as sequencing, system recovery, and service tiering.

After reviewing the documentation, Diaxion conducted workshops to confirm the desired target state for both DR and BCP, and to understand or confirm current gaps. Diaxion also brought samples of different DR strategies, plans and runbook formats from previous engagements to facilitate alignment to the style best suited to the organisation. The workshops were held with key stakeholders across the business including risk and crisis managers, BIA process manager, operations manager, service owner, and solution design lead.

In the Analysis phase, Diaxion analysed capability gaps and determined how they could be best resolved; be that through technology, process improvement, 3rd party requirements, or people capability and capacity.  Diaxion then identified an appropriate DR framework for the client and assessed them against it by considering how the framework would integrate into the existing Crisis Management Plan, the DR charter and triggers to be catered for, and the DR calendar. Diaxion also considered initial socialisation and ongoing project life cycle integration, training and testing for re-establishment, and how to test and mature the DR capability over a two year period.

The Plan phase saw Diaxion use the findings from the Analysis phase to create and update our client’s DR documentation. These documents included an overall DR strategy and plan, DR plans for each application and service, and a DR runbook. While the client was responsible for the construction of the plans and a further set of applications, Diaxion provided the supporting framework, explanation, oversight, assistance, and quality assurance review of one. Diaxion took a collaborative approach to review all documents, provide feedback and ensure consistency.

The final phase was run as a walk-through of the DR plans, where all relevant teams needed to confirm that the DR plans aligned sufficiently with the requirements and could realistically be implemented in the case of a disaster scenario. There were two review cycles which aimed to detect any technical or non-technical issues or concerns, and to inform the final DR documentation.

Diaxion’s engagement followed a phased approach of Discovery, Analyse and Optimise. In the Discovery phase, Diaxion undertook the work by reviewing documentation and conducting workshops. The initial documentation requested covered various areas including business services, solution design and architecture, recovery processes, delivery channels and infrastructure, data flows, testing strategy and concurrency mapping, BIA, network architecture, operational processes and root cause analysis for previous outages.

Diaxion performed a review of existing documentation, completed workshops with stakeholders and familiarised ourselves with the business and technology landscape. We then took the output of the discovery, used the information and our knowledge of the wider IT market and industry trends to perform an analysis both with and without our client. This analysis was able to identify gaps, issues and themes from the discovery phase and form the foundation for the delivery of architecture artefacts.

Diaxion proceeded with an options phase that produced the initial artefacts including a set of IT principles for the organisation, roadmap options for the way forward and a high-level current state capability assessment.

Diaxion’s engagement followed a phased approach of Discovery, Analysis, Plan, and Exercise. In the Discovery phase, Diaxion undertook the work by reviewing documentation and conducting workshops. The initial  documentation requested covered various areas including current DR and BCP, recent Business Impact Assessment (BIA), DR charter, Crisis Management Plan, last DR and BCP exercises, and supporting documentation such as sequencing, system recovery, and service tiering.

After reviewing the documentation, Diaxion conducted workshops to confirm the desired target state for both DR and BCP, and to understand or confirm current gaps. Diaxion also brought samples of different DR strategies, plans and runbook formats from previous engagements to facilitate alignment to the style best suited to the organisation. The workshops were held with key stakeholders across the business including risk and crisis managers, BIA process manager, operations manager, service owner, and solution design lead.

In the Analysis phase, Diaxion analysed capability gaps and determined how they could be best resolved; be that through technology, process improvement, 3rd party requirements, or people capability and capacity.  Diaxion then identified an appropriate DR framework for the client and assessed them against it by considering how the framework would integrate into the existing Crisis Management Plan, the DR charter and triggers to be catered for, and the DR calendar. Diaxion also considered initial socialisation and ongoing project life cycle integration, training and testing for re-establishment, and how to test and mature the DR capability over a two year period.

The Plan phase saw Diaxion use the findings from the Analysis phase to create and update our client’s DR documentation. These documents included an overall DR strategy and plan, DR plans for each application and service, and a DR runbook. While the client was responsible for the construction of the plans and a further set of applications, Diaxion provided the supporting framework, explanation, oversight, assistance, and quality assurance review of one. Diaxion took a collaborative approach to review all documents, provide feedback and ensure consistency.
The final phase was run as a walk-through of the DR plans, where all relevant teams needed to confirm that the DR plans aligned sufficiently with the requirements and could realistically be implemented in the case of a disaster scenario. There were two review cycles which aimed to detect any technical or non-technical issues or concerns, and to inform the final DR documentation.