One of the key ways they ensure continual satisfaction is by maintaining an IT infrastructure that’s ahead of the curve and backed by Postgres.
With thousands of applications and platforms serving a wide range of different functions, countries and teams, Telia’s infrastructure is incredibly complex. Despite this complexity, Telia was able to seamlessly migrate to the cloud to increase flexibility, power, scalability and more with the help of Postgres and EDB.
We invited Thomas Nesvoll-Jenssen, head of cloud and infrastructure at Telia, to discuss how and why Telia went cloud native in our latest customer spotlight webinar.
Your customers expect a database that’s agile, cost-efficient and future-proofed
Nesvoll-Jenssen highlighted the new generation of customers today with increased expectations for products and businesses. As a result, many companies are working on transforming their operations and infrastructure to become more agile. Like other companies, Telia recognized the importance of accelerating deliveries, shortening time-to-value, lowering their cost base, increasing quality and attracting and retaining competence to future-proof their business.
Being successful requires identifying and jumping on new business opportunities as they arise. As open source databases can provide a quick and efficient way to leverage new opportunities, many enterprises are adopting cloud and increasing their use of enterprise open source software for emerging technologies.
With the world becoming more cloud native, Telia realized that they needed to become cloud native too, in order to stay competitive in all of their markets.
Nesvoll-Jenssen explained how they began their transition to open source in the cloud by looking at their heritage of databases and applications to determine the current state of each and assess whether migration would be easy, medium, or complex.
Easy migrations involved:
- Applications that use object-relational mapping packages, making it easy to switch to a new database protocol
- Typical programming languages like Java and C#
- Database usage as a single schema containing few tables with no XML/JSON stored
- Migration compatibility of 95% or greater
Medium migrations involved:
- Applications that use ORM with dynamic SQL in a few places
- A few schemas with no database links required
- More than 200 database objects and less than 90 percent migration compatibility
Complex migrations involved:
- Applications using ORM, with dynamic SQL in a few places
- A lot of application dependencies
- Databases with a large number of objects
- Pro*C in use on the application
By mapping out the migration paths and planning ahead to meet technical requirements, Telia was able to streamline and accelerate their migration journey.
More than simply understanding technical requirements though, Nesvoll-Jenssen addressed the importance of getting stakeholder and team buy-in before transitioning to open source. He also emphasized the importance of having an experienced partner to support the migration journey and needs beyond.
Telia relied on EDB’s competency and expertise for their successful transition to Postgres in the cloud.
Benefits of Postgres in the cloud
Telia’s move to the cloud resulted in numerous benefits, and they found they were better able to:
- Attract and retain core competence
- Improve time-to-market
- Eliminate application defects and downtime
- Improve application performance
- Automate application development
- Manage applications more easily
- Bolster security capabilities
- Ensure scalability and resiliency
Telia attained multiple business advantages with Postgres in the cloud.
Telia was able to cut time spent on routine maintenance by offering a self-service portal where stakeholders could upgrade versions, deliver support, patch and execute other automated activities. By shifting focus from back-office operations to business strategy, Telia was able to connect more closely with their customers.
With open source cloud capabilities, Telia’s empowered and supported new developers with innovative ideas, while consistently meeting data storage and management regulations.
Telia is just the latest example of an innovator embracing open source cloud database’s potential: to drive digital transformation, attract and retain top talent, increase scalability and ensure dynamic community support.
Now it’s your turn.