Case study · TRANSFORM
National restoration-services franchisor
275 applications to the cloud in 18 months — on time, on budget
A national franchisor was running its franchise network on 275+ legacy ASP.NET applications nobody fully understood anymore. We migrated all of them — applications, data, and network in parallel — without leaving one behind.
- Industry
- Franchise services
- Engagement
- 18 months
- Services
- Migration & transformation leadership · Application refactoring & containerization · Custom discovery tooling
Situation
A national restoration-services franchisor was running its business — and its franchisees’ businesses — on more than 275 legacy ASP.NET applications accumulated over years. The platform needed to move to the cloud, but the organization had a problem more dangerous than old code: a lack of domain knowledge. Nobody could say with confidence which applications were actually in use, what depended on what, or what would break if something was turned off.
That’s the real risk in a migration this size. It isn’t the apps you know about. It’s the one you didn’t know was load-bearing.
What we did
Four workstreams ran in parallel and in coordination: applications were updated and refactored for the cloud and prepared for container deployment; data and storage migrated to a new database architecture; and a system of automation handled internal and external network configuration. All of it ran with security and redundancy in mind, under SOC 2 oversight.
The piece we’re proudest of solved the domain-knowledge problem directly. With 275+ applications and no reliable inventory, we built a custom forensics tool that mapped network components and identified which applications were genuinely in use — and how heavily. That let us migrate the most-used applications first, which cut risk for the client and gave them the confidence to commit to going live on the new system as planned.
The other key decision: replicating data in both the legacy and cloud environments throughout the migration. That made a phased cutover possible — no big-bang weekend, no point of no return.
Outcome
Every application accounted for, migrated, and live — over 18 months, on time and on budget. The franchisor and its franchisees kept operating through the entire transition.
The lesson we carry from this one: in legacy migrations, discovery is the project. The engineering is demanding but known. Knowing what you actually have — and proving nothing in use gets left behind — is what separates a managed migration from an expensive surprise.
Outcomes
- 275+ applications migrated from legacy ASP.NET to container deployment
- On time, on budget across four coordinated parallel workstreams
- Zero apps left behind a custom forensics tool found every system actually in use