Discover how an organisation in the property industry transformed operations with a cloud-first strategy
Objective
A company in the property industry with over 1,000 employees and more than 50 remote sites was seeking to move out of their existing data centre and embrace a cloud-first strategy. They needed agility that only cloud can provide to suit their rapidly changing business environment, and also to reduce costs.
Approach
With a deadline set for moving out of a current hosting environment, the customer chose this moment to adopt a cloud-first approach. The customer worked with Data#3 through an existing relationship as their Managed Services provider to provide the skills to support their transition.
IT Outcomes
Business Outcomes
In the fast-paced property industry, staying current isn’t enough, you need to be a step ahead of your competitors and always be driving constant innovation and evolution. This customer sought to modernise their ICT environment with a simultaneous migration from a legacy hosted data centre to Microsoft Azure, but also to modernise their collaboration, migrating from legacy file servers to a cloud-centric collaboration model with OneDrive and SharePoint from Microsoft 365.
Day to day operations meant a heavy reliance on this customers ICT infrastructure, from managing their rent rolls to building advertising campaigns for their property listings across their corporate and franchise offices. ICT is mission critical to the business. As they faced the exit of their data centre, the sense of urgency to ensure they moved to cloud in a secure, planned manner became increasingly important. The customer was also seeking to relieve their costs by embracing cloud, so it was critical to ensure that workloads were rightsized and cost optimised prior to migration.
Data#3 established a new landing zone for the customer in a hub-and-spoke architecture. Azure Migrate was then used to migrate the 21 eligible workloads from the hosting environment to Azure. There were a mix of Windows Server 2012 R2 and 2016 servers. Among the migration targets.
There were 12 servers that required redeployment to more modern operating system versions which entailed provisioning new server hosts in Azure, with the application then being migrated from the legacy host to the new target server. This ensured that unsupported workloads were modernised during the cloud transition.
There were also over 20 legacy file servers that were decommissioned from the hosting environment that with their contents moved to the customer’s M365 tenant with targets of OneDrive for personal storage or SharePoint for shared storage.
Cost savings are being realised as the cloud environment is now operational, while also unlocking new opportunities for the customer to innovate in the new cloud environment.
The customer now also has enhanced resilience as they have high availability between multiple Azure regions in Australia.
Unsupported workloads were identified and treated to reduce business risk and tighten the security posture of the customer.
Transitioning to cloud has allowed the customer to realise cost savings stemming from the Data centre exit. This has reduced their operating costs through a reduction in CAPEX expenditure over the prior hosting environment. They have also gained advantages in flexibility, performance and financial and environmental cost.
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