Delighting Customers with Improved Performance in Azure Cloud

This Australian manufacturer had reached its physical data center capacity limits. Its new strategy planned a cloud transition that would achieve improved business benefits in multiple dimensions. With a move to Azure, cloud expenses have been reduced, and an aging infrastructure replaced. Application performance is accelerated, reliability increased, and business continuity improved. After delivering the complete cloud migration, SoftwareONE provides ongoing support with AzureSimple and PyraCloud to optimize Azure use and to relief the internal IT team.

The Australian company is part of a multinational corporation in Asia that manufactures electronic devices and appliances. Core technologies and products range from LCD and solar panels to mobile phones and document systems. The company's products are sold in internationally, supported by multiple manufacturing operations and sales companies worldwide.

Facing periodic slowdowns in application performance that impacted business growth, this manufacturer needed a new structure that improved scalability and flexibility. The company was motivated to transition from on-site operations in two data centers to the cloud.

Multiple expected benefits included performance enhancements over its aging infrastructure. Reliability improvements would ensure improved business continuity that avoided any outage that could slow or stop critical work. Also, security and compliance improvements were a high priority.

With its current broad mix of hardware publishers, added advantages came from replacing physical servers with virtual infrastructure to save operating and ongoing hardware refresh costs. The cloud move would also simplify management and provide the company with scalability and flexibility in standby capacity to meet seasonal peak demands.

Finally, a cloud move would provide an opportunity to concentrate and elevate the essential technical skills of internal staff while tapping an external service provider to provide ongoing Managed Cloud services to optimize Azure use and to relief the internal IT team.

A long and proven relationship helped the company select SoftwareONE to manage its cloud migration.

The migration project started with SoftwareONE’s careful analysis of the existing datacenter and Cloud VMware infrastructure. The second phase defined the CloudBuild, where the company's cloud infrastructure foundation was established, creating the cloud plan, policies, and an Azure configuration to comply with its business objectives. The CloudMigrate phase executed the Azure cloud transition, including deploying migration tools and resources, and a rolling migration to accommodate differing requirements across systems and applications.

An additional phase followed the completed migration to address the company’s Disaster Recovery (DR) objectives. SoftwareONE implemented a detailed recovery plan and put Azure Site Recovery in place.

Knowledge transfer has been integral to the completion of SoftwareONE’s cloud engagement to facilitate the manufacturer’s transition to its new IT environment. So, a final workshop transfer session provided the local IT team with details on the new infrastructure, including cloud design documents and an operations guide.

For optimal Managed Cloud support, the company has upgraded its SoftwareONE AzureSimple service to gain 24x7 support, including Microsoft Premier Support. With the PyraCloud Pro service, it gains transparency and control of its cloud spend on Azure combined with consumption analytics and proactive recommendations to optimize budget planning and expense projections.

• Performance: The Azure cloud migration has substantially modernized an aging IT infrastructure for significant performance and customer satisfaction improvements.
• Security & Compliance: In conjunction with cloud migration, security has been consolidated. Improvements in compliance monitoring have satisfied a top priority. Security events can be correlated to help implement proactive security initiatives.
• Scalability and Flexibility: The new cloud infrastructure provides flexibility to easily increase or decrease scale to accommodate changing business needs and provide standby capacity for seasonal peak demands and business growth.
• Manageability: IT management has been centralized and simplified as part of cloud adoption. This significantly minimizes the risks of shadow IT, and, with SoftwareONE’s Managed Cloud services, a broad mix of tools and expertise is immediately available to address all IT complexities.
• Expense Reduction: The Azure cloud transition has eliminated the expense of deploying, monitoring, patching, and maintaining on-premises servers and infrastructure. Now, cloud operations mean paying only for the compute resources and capacity needed. PyraCloud consumption analysis and recommendations continuously help to optimize cloud spend management.
• Disaster Recovery (DR) Readiness: A primary cloud transition objective has been achieved. DR coverage, scaled across business-critical applications, is backed by Azure’s service availability and support to restore data using Azure Site Recovery. The manufacturer is protected against any data loss, and business continuity is assured throughout the IT environment.