Case study
Energy Sector Elasticsearch Migration to Elastic Cloud
How SquareShift migrated a Canadian energy producer's on-prem Elasticsearch cluster to Elastic Cloud with under three hours of downtime.
One of Canada's largest oil and natural gas producers, running mission-critical ingestion pipelines with real-time data requirements.
The company needed to modernize its Elasticsearch infrastructure for better performance, availability, and cloud scalability.
Indices and 1.3TB of data migrated to Elastic Cloud. Downtime during cutover. Roles, ILM, and SLM policies rebuilt in the cloud.
Key servicesHow SquareShift delivered it.
The challenge
The client, one of Canada’s largest oil and natural gas producers, ran a 3-node on-prem Elasticsearch cluster carrying 465 indices and 1.3 terabytes of search-critical data. Its ingestion pipelines were mission-critical and real-time, so a move to Elastic Cloud had to preserve every index, role, and policy without disrupting operations.
Early snapshot attempts failed on security validations, and the client’s Azure footprint was fragmented across multiple subscriptions — both had to be resolved before cutover, not discovered during it.
What we delivered
SquareShift ran the migration in three phases: preparation, testing, and final cutover. Snapshot issues surfaced and were resolved on a non-production Elastic Cloud cluster first, so the live cutover ran against a proven process.
The team rebuilt the deployment on Elastic v8.13.2, merged the client’s Azure billing under a single subscription, and recreated every security role, ILM policy, and SLM configuration in the new environment.
The payoff
The live restoration completed in under three hours, with all 465 indices, 1.3 terabytes of data, roles, and policies intact. The client now runs a modernized, single-subscription Elastic Cloud environment built for the performance and scalability the on-prem cluster couldn’t deliver.
Snapshot failures rarely surface until restore day — catching them in a non-production test cutover is what keeps a fixed downtime window from becoming a missed one.
Cloud Modernization Practice Lead, SquareShift
Where this work sits