Teranet saves millions moving to Azure and Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Delivering on a promise of performance for land titling services

Teranet was formed with a mission to efficiently connect government, business, and consumers, and it’s been doing just that since 1991. Teranet began as a government agency in Ontario before becoming a standalone land titles and statutory registry services company in 2003. Today, it maintains exclusive rights to the online property search, writs database, and land registration system of Canada’s most populous province. In 2014, it purchased the Manitoba electronic land and personal property registry, giving it a boost in the national market. It has also installed public registry systems in more than 25 jurisdictions globally with its investment in Foster Moore. 

Digitizing and modernizing land, personal property, and other essential registries provides citizens with peace of mind while giving governments and industries confidence in the security and accuracy of their records. Teranet certifies land titles, registers financial interests, and maintains survey records, ensuring these processes are seamless, secure, and reliable.

Initially a mainframe shop, Teranet transitioned to open systems, incorporating some Unix operating systems. Shortly after, it embraced the datacenter revolution and built two of its own datacenters. But Teranet reached a point where it needed the resources and capability to reliably expand on demand. “We had legacy backup systems, very matured disaster recovery, and the ability to purchase hardware and run it for long periods of time, but we couldn’t turn on and burst,” says Nicholas Laine, Director of IT – Cloud & Platform Architecture at Teranet. This ability for teams to quickly get started with new technologies is especially important as the business scales and hopes to optimize cloud costs. Adds Ravinder Singh, Chief Technology Officer at Teranet, “We saw the right-hand turn before we got to it and recognized that we had to change, or we could never operate with the scale and agility we needed.” 

To set the company up for successful growth, Teranet decided to move to a cloud platform for always-available scale and technological capabilities and to retrain staff to focus on services and automation versus racking and stacking services. “The elasticity of the cloud allowed us to consider how we could do things differently (cloud native), including adding automation with infrastructure as code and providing Teranet the ability to leverage the security features offered by industry leaders such as Microsoft,” says Laine.

Accelerating from migration to modernization ahead of schedule

Teranet’s customers depend on its registry and land titles systems along with its financial services platforms, so the company looked for a cloud vendor with proven experience and use cases in the industry. “Our journey to the cloud is about scale, agility, and doing things better and quicker,” says Singh. “It’s also about security—protecting our core and our customers’ assets.”

According to Teranet IT leaders, moving the company’s systems, platforms, and applications to Azure made sense from every angle, including performance, costs, access to resources, and the ability to scale and help secure the full environment. The company embraced a full digital transformation over a straightforward technology upgrade.

Much of Teranet’s environment ran on Red Hat OpenShift, with clusters in its datacenters running OpenShift Container Platform 4.6. Teranet adopted Azure Red Hat OpenShift, redeploying containers from its on-premises systems to Azure using Spring Boot and other runtime kits. It also worked with Red Hat Professional Services to bring those containers and systems directly into the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure so staff can focus on delivering automation, including self-service provisioning for developers, instead of platform maintenance. “From a senior manager’s perspective, we don’t need as many people looking at as many widgets, so they’re more efficient, and it’s easier tooling in a single pane of glass inside Azure versus having multiple dashboards,” says Laine.

To help manage costs, Teranet uses a series of OpenShift clusters, depending on the line of business, which it’s sized for scalability. “We’ve also done some reservations with our FinOps team to make sure that the capacity we’re using and what we think we need to use are optimized,” says Laine. This led to faster speeds and new efficiencies moving from a non-managed to a managed service and helped ensure the company has the right distribution of CPU and storage for its core infrastructure. Teranet’s full project timeline spanned three years, from day one of planning to migrating 100% of what it planned to migrate to the cloud successfully and ahead of schedule.

Retraining employees with buy-in from the top down

Supporting both the initial migration and its ongoing modernization plans, Teranet has been developing and honing employees’ working knowledge of automation, cloud provisioning, FinOps, telemetry, and other capabilities made possible by the cloud. “Our biggest milestone achieved was our people gaining the skills they need to succeed,” explains Singh. “We brought on expertise from Microsoft for the cloud, Rackspace Technology for engineering, and Slalom for deploying the cloud at a program level. These three players helped us teach our people to fish, and did they ever learn to fish. Our folks got certified and made a huge difference in our transformation.” 

IT leaders saw employees across the organization, including from unrelated business functions, step up and embrace the opportunity for professional growth and to enjoy new work. “We knew this program would take a village to be successful and that a central committee couldn’t do it all,” says Singh. “Everyone was the central committee.” IT leaders had full buy-in from company executives, including a mandate from the CEO. “We touched every system, customer, contract, and interface,” notes Singh. 

Defining real impact and mapping the road ahead

While celebrating their achievements, Teranet IT leaders recognize that even more significant advancements are on the horizon. “We got everything moved to the cloud, and now we’re on the transformative journey of becoming cloud native with the cloud as our ecosystem,” says Singh. “Before, we built and owned everything. Now, we have a plethora of applications, application providers, and other capabilities we can use to bring solutions to market dramatically faster. And our people are becoming the conductors of the orchestra as opposed to building the whole orchestra.”

The company’s upcoming cloud-native projects involve streamlining infrastructure and using automation to change models and simplify existing practices and processes while keeping things highly secure and stable—and in-house. Teranet will run Azure Database for PostgreSQL as a hosted platform as a service and use Azure Container Registry to support Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Functions, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, and Azure DevOps Services. Also, the company is heavily focused on using cloud-native security capabilities, including Microsoft Defender solutions, to help protect its core and build a Zero Trust strategy. 

“We’re not going to go cloud native for the sake of going cloud native, but where it allows us to remove tools and simplify our practices, processes, or infrastructure, we’ll absolutely change our tooling,” says Singh. “Our customers will benefit from us making changes quicker, modifying sooner, and streamlining through automation while keeping everything safe, secure, and stable.” In fact, automation is already having a major impact on Teranet’s change success rates, coming in at a less than 0.5% fail rate. Customers also benefit from the significant availability of the company’s systems, and Teranet continues to sustain or exceed those performance levels. “At every milestone, we’ve been true to our brand promise, which is a promise of performance and excellence,” says Singh. “That brand promise has been upheld, and our clients have given us incredible feedback.” 

“A journey well worth pursuing”

Teranet continues to design and build architecture to support migrating additional capabilities to Azure. And it’s well positioned for further growth through faster development of new products and services accelerated by AI, serverless computing, and machine learning—all within budget. “Within the cloud migration program, we ran our datacenter hardware to its end of life where possible, providing CAD5.6 million savings in our capital expenditures in 2023,” says Laine. Adds Singh, “We had an objective to really increase our agility without increasing our costs, and we succeeded, managing our costs to get more for the same spend.”

“This is a journey well worth pursuing,” concludes Singh, who personally looks forward to supporting rapid company growth more easily than before. “Our teams now have new capabilities and skills to leverage. And customers have a great deal of faith in us as a modern technology company that invests in cloud, AI, and other advanced technologies.”

Discover more about Teranet on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and Vimeo.