Delighting customers with improved performance in Azure Cloud

About the client

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.

The challenge

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.

The solution

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.