More speed, less haste: 4 stories that show the value of solid cloud foundations

Imagine building a skyscraper on a foundation of sand. That's precisely what some organisations are doing as they rush to the cloud to capture efficiencies and benefit from advanced analytics, GenAI, and automation.

While they may be right to accelerate cloud adoption, without solid foundations, it won’t just be business-transforming solutions that scale-up with their initiative, but problems with security, compliance, cost and complexity.

According to Gartner, as many as 25% of organisations will face cloud project dissatisfaction by 2028, largely due to poor implementation and governance.

To avoid this fate, and to return promised value to the business, initiatives need to build on solid ground, and that usually starts with a well-architected landing zone.

SoftwareOne has a track record of helping clients do just this – shaping and deploying landing zones so that cloud initiatives create their desired business outcomes. In this article, we'll move beyond the blueprints and explore four real-world stories that showcase the tangible, business value of a strong cloud foundation.

A primary benefit of a well-architected landing zone is the ability to provision new applications with speed and consistency.

This is especially valuable when companies need to integrate multiple business critical systems into a modernised platform. If not well executed, complex transformations such as these can impact business continuity. By offering a pre-configured and repeatable architecture, landing zones reduce the complexity and risk typically associated with integrating multiple systems across different environments and accelerate deployment.

Becoming a business giant after a merger, Spain’s Altadia Group sought new levels of flexibility and security by migrating its entire on-premises SAP system to Google Cloud. SoftwareOne created a migration roadmap of the entire infrastructure to enable a smooth and effective transition of all SAP environments including SAP HANA to Google Cloud. This included building the landing zone on Google Cloud alongside setting up code deployments for different SAP environments. The entire project was carried out without end users noticing anything other than improved system performance. The flexibility provided by Google Cloud is critical as the group continues to focus on innovation and growth, and internal technology demands become more complex as a result.

Google Cloud gives us the assurance that we have absolutely reliable replication. And especially given the growth of the group, it is business-critical for us that Google Cloud guarantees complete scalability of the environment. In particular, changes in machine size, machine performance and other adjustments are much easier to achieve than in an on-premises environment.

– Ernesto Plaza, CIO, Altadia Group– Ernesto Plaza, CIO, Altadia Group

Enhanced security by design

A well-architected landing zone embeds security best practices from the outset, establishing clear identity management, network policies, and proactive threat monitoring to reduce risk.

For many orgnaisations security is not just an IT issue; it is fundamental to their mission and reputation. Art Fund, a UK-based charity dedicated to supporting museums and galleries, relies on its website to act as a secure, reliable and highly available shop front. Outages would have a direct impact on the charity’s ability to raise funds and donors need to have confidence that they can safely make payments.

The charity was running on AWS, however, it wanted to modernise the environment, by using industry best practice standards and improving security, availability and operability. SoftwareOne deployed a landing zone using the AWS Well-Architected Framework, automatically configuring a new account structure fully compliant with Center for Internet Security standards and AWS Foundational Security Best Practices. Workloads were migrated using Infrastructure as Code for immutability, and the AWS ‘Account Vending Machine’ service that was part of the landing zone, enabled the rapid, secure provisioning of new accounts.

The frameworks provided by the landing zone enabled an approach that transformed Art Fund's risk posture, boosting their AWS Security Hub score to 87% and giving them assurance that they could grow their stakeholder base without increasing risk.

SoftwareOne managed the AWS modernisation process for us smoothly and continues to provide us with invaluable support and value for money. We look forward to evolving our cloud journey with them as we take on even more ambitious projects to achieve our mission of making art more accessible to everyone.

– Peter McAndrew, LiveOps Manager, Art Fund

Successful businesses tend to grow, and well-architected landing zone provides a modular, scalable foundation designed to evolve with the company. This future-proofs technology investments, ensuring the infrastructure can support new workloads and services without major re-engineering.

Australian chain Grill’d Healthy Burgers faced a challenge when their on-premises IT could not support their ambitious plan to open 100 new restaurants and launch an innovative drive-through experience. Past transformation efforts had failed to provide a platform for sustainable future growth, and so Grill’d turned to SoftwareOne to migrate their entire infrastructure to Microsoft Azure for a unified and scalable IT foundation.

After conducting a Well-Architected Review of its existing environment, SoftwareOne configured an Azure Enterprise Scale Landing Zone, that provided scalable and resilient core services that could adapt to real-time needs. SoftwareOne then assisted in adapting their Azure cloud governance strategy, completing server discovery and assessments using the Azure Migrate Tool.

With firm foundations in place, the initiative proceeded with a focused migration, replacing on-premises servers with appropriately sized virtual machines. This not only gave Grill'd the agility to support its growth trajectory but also enabled a 30% reduction in costs.

SoftwareOne’s strategic and solution implementation expertise has been simply outstanding across the board, and they never fail to deliver. They streamline our licensing, data management and cyber security making everything simpler and leveraging their strong Microsoft relationship to our advantage, especially with the Azure move. Their deep understanding of Microsoft products and direct line to support have been beyond Invaluable.

– Keith Bui, Infrastructure & Service Desk Manager, Grill’d Healthy Burgers

Streamlined governance and compliance

Maintaining control and adhering to regulatory requirements in a dynamic cloud environment can be a significant challenge. The currently shifting geopolitical and trade landscape has increased the impetus to maintain local control over data and technology and digital sovereignty capabilities in the public cloud are now key for many organisations.

Landing zones can be configured to meet requirements from the outset and provide a centralised framework for governance, policy enforcement, resource tagging, access control, and cost management. This ensures that all deployments are compliant with internal standards and external regulations from the moment they are created.

DTEK, Ukraine's largest private investor in energy, operate in a highly regulated space that spans finance and national infrastructure. Their existing private SAP cloud infrastructure couldn’t easily scale to meet their needs, lacked monitoring tools to track performance, and couldn’t provide the range of services it needed to support growth.

As a result, DTEK chose to migrate its SAP infrastructure to AWS Cloud, which had the capabilities to meet the company’s business impact analysis, disaster recovery and information security requirements. DTEK engaged SoftwareOne and after a thorough assessment, 10 closely aligned work streams kicked-off, including development of an AWS Landing Zone.

During the design phase, data protection and data residency were a particular focus, facilitating the project’s substantial compliance requirements. AWS Identity and Access Management and AWS IAM Identity Centre were used to ensure that only authorised employees could access critical systems, while IAM Roles Anywhere made it possible to securely manage access to AWS resources from external environments.

In DTEK’s case, the landing zone provided the centralised control and automated oversight necessary to manage their diverse enterprise environment, maintain compliance and innovate with confidence – proving that agility and control can, and should, coexist.