MYOB migrates to Australian Azure infrastructure

Accounting software company MYOB has migrated its AccountRight Live cloud service to Microsoft’s Australia-based Azure infrastructure with zero client downtime.

The company moved its 120,000 customer databases from a data centre in Singapore to Microsoft’s facilities in Sydney and Melbourne over 21 nights, establishing 312 Elastic Pools on the Azure cloud.

The successful migration has improved data extraction speeds by 45% and significantly reduced latency for MYOB cloud customers.

MYOB General Manager of Engineering and Experience Adam Ferguson said the move was aimed at increasing the speed of the system, enhancing the operational management of data files and boosting MYOB’s ability to monitor, log and move databases to optimise operations.

The company worked closely with Microsoft before and during the migration, conducting the transfer using a series of scripts and tools customised by Microsoft for the MYOB transition.

As part of the migration, MYOB has updated AccountRight to be multidata-centre aware, which allows load to be spread across the two Australian data centres using Elastic Pools. In the event of an outage, this also allows for processing to be seamlessly switched to the other data centre.

Ferguson said the migration was seamlessly executed from a client’s point of view.

“It was incredibly well executed to the point that I don’t think any clients would have noticed or been aware that we had made such a significant change in the back end both from an underlying database infrastructure to the geographical location of the actual database,” he said.

Image courtesy of Rainer Stropek under CC