OAHI fast-tracks its AWS migration, cutting costs and laying the foundation for AI-powered workforce management
At a glance | Key outcomes |
OAHI is a workforce management platform for Australia's home care and community services sector, supporting many critical service organisations and up to 50,000 peak concurrent users. Following a complex divestment, OAHI's on-premises infrastructure could no longer keep pace. Partnering with PurePlay Cloud, OAHI executed a full-scale, accelerated migration of its entire server estate - including seven SQL Server instances, file services, and Active Directory - to a resilient, cloud-native AWS environment, delivered weeks ahead of schedule. | ✓ ~>50% reduction in infrastructure costs. ✓ RTO reduced to under 2 minutes, with near-zero RPO. ✓ Minimal operational disruption despite a compressed, fast-tracked delivery. ✓ Manual database refreshes now fully automated. ✓ Entire environment deployed via Infrastructure as Code - no manual console configuration. ✓ All servers, including SQL Server instances, migrated and re-platformed onto AWS-managed services. |
OAHI provides mission-critical workforce management software to the retail, construction, finance, home care and community services sectors - rostering, time entry, and award interpretation that feeds directly into downstream payroll for its client organisations. Formed out of a complex corporate divestment, OAHI inherited an on-premises environment that was ageing, exposed some operational risk, and increasingly unable to keep pace with the product modernisation plan for OAHI’s customers.
Working with PurePlay Cloud, OAHI moved its entire estate to AWS - and did it faster than anyone in the room expected, as business factors forced the timeline forward by months.
The Challenge: Legacy Infrastructure, Divestment Debt, and a Ticking Clock
OAHI's environment reflected its history. As a business divested from a larger parent, it had inherited a legacy "A/B side" configuration with a C-side disaster recovery replica and much of the underlying hardware approaching end of life.
That legacy created several problems:
Obsolescence and risk. High operational effort went into simply keeping ageing infrastructure patched and production updates flowing, rather than improving the product.
No room to modernise. OAHI couldn't move to a predictable release cadence or modernise its application stack while still fighting to keep the existing environment stable.
Lack of Automation. Database refreshes, testing, and deployment were largely manual.
Cost pressure. Carrying that infrastructure, and the services needed to support it, was expensive for a newly divested business
A preliminary AWS assessment began as a way to gauge competitive standing, but it expanded significantly once the results were returned. Moving OAHI's server estate to AWS proved advantageous not just in terms of cost: benefits included an almost zero recovery point objective, recovery times under two minutes, and complete automation of pipelines throughout their environment.
A Plan Disrupted - and a Team That Didn't Blink
The original roadmap called for a structured Mobilise and Migrate program: build the enterprise-grade AWS landing zone and automation foundations first, validate the approach with pilot workloads, then migrate all production waves - including SQL Server instances, file and SFTP services, and Active Directory.
That plan held right up until changes on OAHI’s on-premise provider side created unexpected urgency accelerating the migration timeline well ahead of schedule
It's the kind of scope and timeline shock that can derail migration projects. It didn't derail this one.
"At no stage were the PurePlay team phased by any of this - the resistance, the scope change, the date changes, the lack of resource availability. Don't get me wrong, this was neither smooth sailing nor simple, but the PurePlay team just took the attitude - we'll get on with the AWS build and get you across ASAP."
Rather than holding to a textbook lift-and-shift, the team adapted the migration pattern in flight - pulling forward the platform-level re-platforming that had originally been scheduled for later waves (Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for the SQL Server estate, FSx for Windows File Server, AWS Managed Active Directory, AWS Transfer Family) so that OAHI landed on a resilient, managed AWS foundation from day one, rather than a rehosted copy of the fragile environment it was leaving behind. Every workload was re-platformed rather than simply rehosted, even under the most severe time pressure, compressing what would normally be sequential decisions into a single fast-moving build.
The Outcome: An AWS Migration Delivered Weeks Ahead of Schedule
OAHI's own team is candid that the migration itself was hard-won, not effortless - but the result was a full transition to AWS delivered well ahead of the original schedule, minimal operational disruption that timeline pressure often brings.
" Our customers see this as a very positive step forward by OAHI, improving performance and hardening our security position."
Early benefits are already showing up in day-to-day operations:
Lower run and operational costs.
Modernised DevOps procedures - PurePlay's environment configuration has already automated customer database refreshes that were previously manual, cutting time, effort, and compute.
Operating simplicity across environments that were previously fragmented across A/B/C sides.
Infrastructure fully codified as IaC with CI/CD pipelines, delivering a repeatable, consistently managed environment.
"It's early days, but the benefits we are already seeing are certainly on the cost side. But also the operating simplicity. The way PurePlay have configured our environments has modernised our DevOps procedures and simplified our processes."
What AWS Opens Up Next
For OAHI, the migration was never just an infrastructure lift - it was the unlock for a broader modernisation agenda that legacy hardware had been holding back.
"Moving to AWS is like finding the lost city of gold. The turnaround for me came when we saw the initial business case from PurePlay, but also realised we could not modernise the application, re-develop our front-end, embed agentive processes, and provide the modern analytic services our customers needed, on our old infrastructure."
With the AWS foundation in place, OAHI is now moving ahead on:
Quarterly product releases, starting in September, with an upgraded UI and embedded agentive services - a release cadence that was impossible on the old infrastructure.
A Workato integration layer, modernising OAHI's middleware and replacing manual, file-based processes for customers.
A modern, AI-based analytics platform on AWS QuickSight services
OAHI has extended its relationship with PurePlay Cloud beyond the migration itself, engaging them as a strategic partner for Application Managed Services on AWS and for the analytics and AI work ahead.
"This has been a ride - from sceptics seeing that initial business case and having the 'aha' moment, to facing the resistance and hurdles imposed by our infrastructure partner, and overcoming the challenges brought about by our legacy architecture. PurePlay have been there with us at every step."