Time-sensitive critical digital infrastructure re-platforming on Umbraco Cloud.

John Holland Group partnered with Soda Digital to urgently re-platform and migrate multiple business-critical websites from legacy Umbraco 7 environments to the latest Long-Term Support(LTS) version of Umbraco CMS running on Umbraco Cloud. The project involved migrating several websites operating on unsupported infrastructure, including end-of-life Umbraco and Windows Server environments that were no longer receiving security updates or vendor support.

Large-scale Umbraco migrations require more than CMS knowledge. As an Umbraco Gold Partner, Soda Digital brought deep platform expertise, certified Umbraco specialists, and proven migration processes to the project. This expertise was especially important because there was no direct automated upgrade path available from Umbraco 7 to Umbraco 13. The migration required careful planning, custom migration workflows, infrastructure coordination, and a strong understanding of both legacy and modern Umbraco architectures.

Soda Digital’s senior consultants worked closely with John Holland Group teams across cloud provisioning, authentication integration, deployment strategy, codebase migration, content migration, and go-live coordination to reduce project risk and ensure a smooth transition. The result was a lower-risk migration process delivered successfully within a six-week project timeline.

Soda Digital implemented a re-platforming strategy to migrate the websites onto modern Umbraco 13 builds hosted within Umbraco Cloud. Rather than attempting a risky in-place upgrade, Soda Digital used a proven migration approach combining manual and batch automation processes to safely transfer templates, content, media assets, doctypes, plugins, stylesheets, linked resources, and existing site structures into the new environments.

The project included the setup of secure development environments, Git repositories, deployment pipelines, and fully provisioned Umbraco Cloud instances. Soda Digital also implemented Microsoft Entra authentication workflows, coordinated DNS and SSL migrations, and managed post-launch monitoring and QA support to ensure a stable transition. Three websites were migrated successfully as part of the engagement including:

• Rozelle Interchange

• John Holland Rail Training

• John Holland GMR

Each migration required careful handling of existing site architecture, structured content, search functionality, and large media libraries while ensuring continuity for users and administrators. By moving away from unsupported infrastructure, the organisation gained access to ongoing security updates, modern Microsoft .NET architecture, stronger hosting security, improved reliability, and a much more scalable cloud-based environment.

The migration also introduced modern deployment workflows and significantly reduced the complexity of future upgrades and maintenance. Because Umbraco Cloud provides managed hosting and streamlined version management, the long-term technical overhead associated with maintaining legacy infrastructure has been dramatically reduced.