Global Electric Equipment Manufacturer.

The Challenge.

The client was a leading manufacturer in the electric equipment industry, with more than 40,000 employees across the globe and renowned for both B2B and B2C sales.

We engaged with the manufacturer in three different countries in mainland Europe. The three main offices were running their applications and servers out of different colocation data center, located in each country. 

Each country unit was using different colocation partners, but faced similar problems with their providers: long lead times in terms of making changes and getting things done, at a cost rate which they all perceived as too high. 

At the time of engaging Nordcloud, the manufacturer had already established a fit-for-purpose Azure Cloud Foundation, and were running some test loads there already, but they hadn’t fully taken the step over to public cloud yet. 

The Solution: Migrating and Replatforming to Azure.

Nordcloud was engaged to address the some 20 key applications located across the three different head offices, to migrate them to Azure. 

Within the first month and a half, Nordcloud had carried out a full discovery and assessment across all three data centers. As part of that, we looked at:

• The applications and servers / infrastructure in scope.  
• Current utilisation rates and how to best rightsize and optimise the workloads once on the cloud, both from a cost and efficiency perspective.
• What additional services should be transferred to a cloud services set-up, e.g. monitoring and VPN connections (for partners needing access to some of the applications). 

Over a period of just two months, we carried out the lift and shift migrations to Nordcloud’s Managed Cloud setup on Azure,  facilitating a rapid exit from the data center (migrating Windows servers and SQL databases to Azure). 

Once migrated into our Managed Cloud setup, the team commenced optimisation/rightsizing of the workloads, In parallel with these optimisation activities, we then started looking replatforming some of the database to Azure PaaS alternatives.

The Results.

The result was a painless migration out of three different data centers located in three different countries, reducing hosting and data centre related costs.

• We rapidly carried out a full discovery and assessment plus successful migrations in less than 4 months
• We did so without any negative impact on the day-to-day business of the client.
• We helped upskill some of the client teams, to enable them to handle standard migrations in other countries by themselves.