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Navigating the Cloud:�Aligning Essential Roles for a Successful Data Center Exit at UCOP

May 22, 2025

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About Us

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Eric Person�University of California, Office of the President

10 campuses, 5 medical centers, 3 national laboratories

295,000 students

69 Nobel Prize winners

92 MacArthur “Genius” grants

63 National Medal of Science winners

14 Breakthrough Prize winners

40 Pulitzer Prize winners

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About UCOP

The University of California Office of the President (UCOP)

UCOP supports the campuses and students through systemwide funding and programs, manages operations, and oversees the medical centers and national labs.

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About our Data Center Exit Project

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Project Inception

Drivers:

Avoid hardware refresh cycle
Upgrade EOL systems
Avoid VMWare renewal

Timeline: Mar 2024 – Dec 2025

Funding: Special Funding Request

Approved Budget: $2.3M

Project idea was pitched by Kari right when I started at UCOP…

Took a back seat to a couple other initiatives (both application migrations to AWS)

Student Applicant system (applyUC) – had some struggles in prior years due to hardware limitations
Pension Administration system – took over support

Eventually got traction with planning/funding requests in 2023

Drivers:

Avoid the hardware refresh cycle
Eliminate colocation fees
Opportunity to upgrade systems to latest/greatest
Avoid the VMWare renewal in March 2025

Original timeline: March 2024 through December 2025

Wrapped up application migrations off VMWare in March 2025
Finished appliance migrations in early May 2025
Followed by hardware decoms & network shut down

Original budget: $2.3M, requested through one time funding request, estimated 10-year ROI

Final spend: $2.0M

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Scope, Strategy and Goals

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Scope

Applications Migrated

On-prem Hosts

Infrastructure Team Members

Critical/High Vulnerabilities Eliminated

Project Budget

Database Platforms Supported

Recurring CapEx Avoidance

$1.1M

~75

51,477

389

7

$2.3M

53

Provisioned Storage

339TB

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Project Strategy

Establish clear goals
Align with leadership
Develop a plan
Identify applications that can move together
Created a schedule with “Waves”
Create a clear schedule
Build the team and execute!

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Goals

Application replatform, fresh installs
Move databases to RDS
Improve security
Update application inventory
Eliminate abandoned systems
Centralize administration
Develop standards, enforce compliance

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Aligning with Leadership: Finding Shared Goals and Priorities

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Finding Shared Goals

What is your organization trying to achieve?

Operational Efficiency?
Cost Efficiency?
Scalability and flexibility?
Enhanced Security?

As we were getting started, we needed to make sure we stayed aligned with Leadership to maintain their support of the project.

Cloud migrations can achieve:

Operational efficiency
Cost efficiency
Scalability
Flexibility
Security

Find ways that the project’s objectives can dovetail with organizational goals to gain support from leadership…

Amongst executive leadership at UCOP, SECURITY was a huge focus (our CIO was very vocal and clear about it being the highest priority), so that’s where we focused our message to create the alignment.

If we tailored our project communications to highlight the project’s security benefits, we maintained rock solid support from executive leadership!

We shared our accomplishments by focusing on the upgrades we were doing (and the vulnerabilities that were eliminated or avoided as a result).

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Getting Started

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Project Kick Off

Keep the message very simple:

Why are we doing the project?
What are the project goals?
What is the timeline?
What is being asked of the Application Owners?

… and we’re off!

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Common Challenges

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Common Challenges

Change resistance

Downtime tolerance, business disruption

Application compatibility

Skill gaps in-house

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Navigating Resistance

Go back to what was communicated during project kickoff

Reiterate project goals, specifically around enhanced security

Escalations & approvals required for any deviations from published standards

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Influencing Up and Around

Build Connections

Show trust and be vulnerable
Be consistent
Ask questions
Seek to understand their needs
Share your goals transparently

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Adhere to Standards

Allows the team to push through resistance
Deviating from standards requires exception approvals

Common challenge: applications need to change to adopt new standards

How to navigate: Establishing standards early gives you influence

Any request to deviate from the standards presented a challenge to the migration team – we dealt with that challenge by making sure the standards were documented and asked the application owners to justify their need to deviate.

With this strategy, we were able to steer people in the direction we wanted.

We defined the approval process!

Require the team to document the business need!
Require high-level approvals to deviate!
We found that the application teams would usually prefer to adopt the standard and avoid the headache...

Graphic on the right represents the general architecture pattern we followed for any app or service moved to AWS

Common three-tier application with load balancer, web, app, database, and potentially shared storage
Generally, the apps were put in a shared hosting account

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Architectural Crosswalk

Overview for mapping larger components of the on-prem and cloud environments…

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Lessons Learned and Best Practices

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Lessons Learned and Best Practices

Define clear goals and objectives.

Assess and prioritize applications.

Create a roadmap with phased migrations.

Don’t try to make each migration ideal.

Stay aligned through daily meetings.

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Lessons Learned and Best Practices

Foster a culture of collaboration and innovation.

Enable and empower your team.

Performance testing – this can become a rabbit hole. Don’t chase perfect.

Establish standards early – lots of them. Stick to them.

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Where We Are Now…

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Where We Are Now…

Finished ahead of schedule

March 2025: application moves complete
May 2025: appliances and network gear migrated/relocated
June 2025: hardware decoms complete

Finished under budget

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THANK YOU

Eric Person

eric.person@ucop.edu

(925) 357-0377