Client story Facilitating a Move to Azure
How a mining company shifted on-premises apps and data to Microsoft Azure with the help of a trusted partner
By Insight Editor / 7 Nov 2020 / Topics: Software
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Mining
Challenge:
- Significant issues with the existing managed services vendor
- Expensive solutions and ineffective performance
- Lack of visibility into the company’s environment
Solution:
In a cooperative partnership with Stratiform and another professional services company, Insight’s Cloud + Data Center Transformation team facilitated a successful move to Microsoft Azure.
Results:
- Servers now operate in Azure rather than an SaaS environment
- Increased visibility into ERP environment
- Reduced monthly costs by $13,000 a month
Solution area:
Insight’s Cloud + Data Center Transformation solutions help clients improve data center availability, performance and efficiency.
A major diamond mining operation was experiencing significant issues with the managed services vendor for its data center.
The vendor’s services were expensive and fraught with operating issues, and the vendor wasn’t being proactive about improving the quality of said services. Plus, due to the outsourcing arrangement, the mining enterprise’s internal team had no detailed technical knowledge of their environment or visibility into their ERP applications data.
The company finally decided to migrate its data centers from the existing service provider. Insight’s Cloud + Data Center Transformation team partnered with Stratiform and another professional services company to complete the migration. Following a complete review of the current hosting services and capabilities, a decision was made to migrate the hosting infrastructure to Azure.
Services performed
Teams from all three companies cooperated to make the migration happen within a tight timeframe.
The following services were performed as part of this transition:
- Current state assessment
- Azure planning workshops for applications, infrastructure and network
- Potential future state architecture developed in Azure for DDM hosting needs
- Creation of a complete migration plan
- DDM environments built in Azure and seeding performed using Azure Site Recovery (ASR)
- ExpressRoute connection to Azure successfully implemented
- Necessary knowledge transferred and training provided to client resources
Results experienced
As a result of this migration, the client experienced a significant uptick in the quality of their data center operations, from increased visibility to reduced costs. To start, business units could now operate servers in an Azure environment rather in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment. The client gained new visibility into their ERP environment, which allowed them to provide key stakeholders with the real-time information to make strategic decisions, which in turn enabled growth of the business. The cost of hosting the workloads was significantly reduced, by $13,000 a month or $150,000 annually. Plus, the client was able to fulfill requests for better backup and availability requirements within well-defined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
