In the industry-wide move to improve the security of digital communications, the deadline-driven decommission of the insecure type of digital certificates took place. Our client was faced with the upgrade of certificates of around 750 enterprise applications across more than 10,000 servers.

To complete the upgrade of digital certificates, an accurate inventory of the applications, application owners, servers, and digital certificates was required. Our client didn’t have any of those inventories, and the data had to be put together by correlating dozens of data sets with varying degrees of data confidence and data quality. Additionally, the impacted application owners were residing in different countries.

We started with the consolidated effort to pull together inventory and ownership of enterprise applications, and how specifically the migration effort was impacting individual applications. After owners were identified, we identified leads that would be responsible for the consolidated migration effort within their areas. Based on participation – we established an effective and agile governance structure. At the same time, we identified common migration patterns and published them across the enterprise to ensure that the most optimal approach is taken for migrations. We conducted organizational change management activities tailored to educate application owners about the upcoming changes. We then established teams of subject matter experts that assisted with the line of business-specific efforts. At the same time, we identified and established line of business-centric governance structures and engaged line of business executives who were made accountable for the outcomes of the migration. As a result, migrations took place before the deadline, avoiding significant issues or downtime of mission-critical applications.