The challenge
A local player in the transportation industry, was grappling with a disparate and increasingly complex on-premise infrastructure.
Their existing environment comprised of over500 servers, over 80 legacy applications, and decentralised workloads across various sites, resulting in rising costs, increasing complexity and restricted scalability.
Recognising the need for a single, centralised infrastructure, the customer explored the possibility of transforming their estate into a more cost-efficient and modernised environment to streamline operations and improve overall efficiency.
Solution
Following careful assessment and discussions with the team at Applied Cloud, the customer opted to leverage the full capabilities of Microsoft's Azure solution to consolidate and modernise their on-premise infrastructure. Azure Stack Hub is Microsoft’s hybrid cloud offering that brings all the benefits of public Azure cloud services to your on-premise datacenter.
The delivery of this programme kickstarted with an extensive assessment of the existing environment. identifying key applications and dependencies which needed to be migrated as group. We collaborated closely with key stakeholders to design a scalable and secure architecture that would meet specific business requirements.
Azure enabled a complete consolidation of all core servers, applications, and data into a single and unified platform. By leveraging Azure services, they were able to modernise their applications and take advantage of advanced features such as data analytics, machine learning, and IoT integration.
Outcome
In the last six months, the implementation of Azure has brought on significant benefits driven by a more streamlined, centralised and standardised platform, reducing complexity and increasing overall efficiency. As demands for transport services fluctuate, Azure Stack Hub's scalability enabled the customer to easily flex resources and meet growing demands. They could scale up or down as needed, optimising costs and resource allocation.
The real value, however, is the reduced maintenance costs by circa £24,000 annually, as the customer no longer needed to operate or maintain their large environment – partly brought on by simplified environment but also improved operational efficiency, position the customer to quickly adapt to changing industry conditions resulting in continued growth.