Businesses everywhere face continuous pressure to transform themselves to meet the needs of their customers. Technology evolves creating new business models while making old ones obsolete. Virtus Partners saw an opportunity and took action, thus increasing market share.
Virtus Partners, a global leader in alternative investments in the financial services industry, was facing explosive growth that required a comprehensive data center transformation. The company was challenged with aging technology, limited IT resources, and inadequate back office support that inhibited their ability to scale and meet business demands quickly.
As part of their strategy, Virtus needed to build a solid presence in Europe and Asia without establishing on-premise/ managed hosting operations in those areas. The current time and cost associated with hosting the operations globally hindered the company’s ability to capitalize on new business opportunities.
Lastly, the cost of operational resources and technology began to outpace the desired financial projections. Virtus needed to manage their data center costs without compromising growth. It was also critically important for the company to ensure top of the line data security, speed, and stability for its systems.
Virtus needed their technology investment to be the springboard for their innovation and growth strategies. They knew a cloud environment would create an efficient and more effective way to add incremental capacity. Therefore, Virtus partnered with 3Cloud to lead the cloud transformation to not only move their data center to Microsoft Azure, but also outline a clear path to modernize their technology infrastructure and optimize the new environment.
3Cloud’s approach focused on three core phases:
“Our vision encompasses more than back office virtual machine management. 3Cloud’s partnership enabled Virtus Partners to transition quickly to where we wanted to be today, and to transform our operations to where we are heading for the future.”
3Cloud worked with Virtus on a three-pronged approach to transform the data center and transition applications to Azure:
The migration of Virtus’ core infrastructure was straightforward, but business demands did not allow downtime during the process. The 3Cloud team developed a wave-based migration approach that enabled Virtus to transition lower-priority applications first, ensuring the validity of the process and functionality, then moving to more critical applications. The 3Cloud team transitioned more than 25TB of data to the new environment within six months.
Once the transformation was complete, Virtus required additional risk oversight and expertise with Azure management. Given Virtus’ extensive and sensitive data platforms, the company turned to 3Cloud for ongoing managed services and Azure expertise across the full breadth of the platform. This included support in virtual machines, PaaS services, and third-party solutions in order to ensure operational excellence.
3Cloud Managed Services supported Virtus on day one of the Azure migration completion, so the transition to a support model was seamless. The 3Cloud team set up environmental and security monitoring and alerting, as well as engagement service support, as part of the overall support services strategy for the company. 3Cloud was on hand to identify system and application performance issues and to help Virtus develop solutions to address any service issues. For example, the Virtus team identified core application servers that were not keeping up with user demands. Together, the teams with Microsoft support engineers determined the performance issue early on. 3Cloud’s expertise and strong relationship with Microsoft enabled the issue to be addressed and fixed quickly.
3Cloud Managed Services continued to work with Virtus’ leadership to identify new cost efficiencies, ongoing recommendations to optimize their environment as they grow, and incorporate new Azure services. In addition, 3Cloud provided regular reporting to improve efficiencies, track issues and resolve, and provide recommendations for usage capacity opportunities.
The 3Cloud team delivered the Virtus data center and infrastructure transformation in less than six months. As part of the transformation strategy, the 3Cloud Managed Services team worked with the Virtus team to identify low utilization servers and storage that would right-size their overall needs more effectively. Through the 3Cloud partnership, Virtus increased their overall environment size, and more importantly saved 21% annually over their previous data center hosting fees.
A large part of the success of the engagement was due to the close partnership with 3Cloud experts guiding the Virtus team through the Azure implementation seamlessly. The added value of 3Cloud’s strong tie to Microsoft, creating a three-way dialog between Virtus, Microsoft, and 3Cloud, was key to addressing Virtus’ long-term business objectives for the transformation.
Virtus’ new environment has positioned the company to address their growth challenges and meet their business demands quickly and effectively.
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