CASE STUDY
An Urgent Rescue: Delivering a Last Minute Cloud Migration for a Critical Government Agency
INTRODUCTION
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents (DIA) oversees the state’s workers’ compensation system. Their role is to ensure that injured workers, employers, insurers, attorneys, and health care providers all have the resources they need to comply with relevant laws and regulations. When the physical data center housing their information was slated for demolition, they faced an immovable deadline and turned to M&S Consulting for help.
The Challenge
The DIA had less than six months to migrate from a physical data center to the cloud. A previous vendor had spent eighteen months on the effort without tangible progress, leaving the agency in a precarious position. Failure to complete the migration before demolition would have put critical data and services at risk.
Work We Did
We stepped in and coordinated closely with the agency’s application engineers and prime contractors to craft a rapid migration plan. Although the DIA relied on Oracle software, Oracle Cloud was not yet a viable option for their stringent security and compliance needs, so we architected a secure Oracle workload migration into AWS. Key steps included:
Detailed migration planning and timeline alignment with demolition schedules
Continuous collaboration with client stakeholders to validate requirements
Leveraging AWS services to optimize performance, storage, and networking for Oracle workloads
Upgrading the Oracle environment during migration to maximize future scalability and security
Solutions
Seamless Migration of Mission-Critical Applications
M&S embedded seasoned OCI engineers, delivered hands‑on workshops, and co‑authored a structured deployment playbook so the university’s team could operate confidently on the new platform.
Strengthened Security with AWS Best Practices
We redesigned networking, security, and firewall policies so OCI meshed with their existing AWS patterns while taking advantage of Oracle‑specific performance and licensing benefits.
Delivered Ahead of Schedule Despite Unforeseen Crisis
Terraform pipelines tied to GitHub Actions now turn every infrastructure change into a version‑controlled, automatically validated pull request, eliminating manual console work and accelerating releases to minutes.
The results
With their workloads running in AWS, the DIA now enjoys
- Lower real estate costs and elimination of on premises maintenance
- Modern cloud capabilities that improve resiliency and scalability
- An upgraded customer management system that streamlines claims processing
conclusion
We stepped in and coordinated closely with the agency’s application engineers and prime contractors to craft a rapid migration plan. Although the DIA relied on Oracle software, Oracle Cloud was not yet a viable option for their stringent security and compliance needs, so we architected a secure Oracle workload migration into AWS. Key steps included: