The Challenge

In the midst of their gradual transition to cloud operations, this industrial machinery and manufacturing firm encountered an unforeseen challenge—an eviction notice from their datacenter providers in Amsterdam and France. Faced with this challenge, the company weighed three potential courses of action.

First, they could opt for the relocation of IT assets to local co-location facilities in two European countries. However, this choice came with notable downsides, including downtime and elevated costs. Alternatively, they could proceed with migrating to the cloud using their existing IT staff, even though their expertise in cloud technologies was limited, along with the absence of a clear roadmap for such a substantial datacenter migration.

The third option involved seeking assistance from a cloud vendor and services partner for planning and executing the migration. However, this path necessitated a thorough vetting process, presenting a challenge given the constrained timeline. Acknowledging the urgency and potential impact on their business, the company reached out to industry leaders such as Microsoft and GCP, along with other co-location providers. Their objective was to formulate a comprehensive exit plan for their European datacenters within a tight 90-day timeframe, with the added requirement of reviewing all proposals within a compressed 30-day window.

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Service
  • Cloud Platform
  • Managed Services
Industry
  • Manufacturing
  • Technology
Company Size
  • 1,001 - 5,000

The Solution

Leveraging the Cloud Roadmap Framework, 3Cloud partnered with Microsoft to guide the client through a series of steps, complemented by 3Cloud 360, instilling confidence in Azure. The process began with a Holistic Business Case (Solution Assessment) using Movere to evaluate global on-premises datacenters and plan for Azure migration. An Azure Health Check (FinOps) reviewed over 180 Azure objects, creating a scalable Common Approach Framework (CAF)-enabled Landing Zone.

The journey continued with a ‘hub and spoke’ Landing Zone tailored to the client’s global requirements. Sequential datacenter migrations in Holland, Singapore, and France (AMMP) combined migration with modernization. 3Cloud Managed Platform was implemented, establishing managed services and a support team for Azure, accelerating knowledge transfer. An App Innovation engagement assessed legacy in-house applications, creating a modernization plan to rebuild them in Azure on Platform as a Service (PaaS). Finally, 3Cloud built a modern data platform using Synapse, Azure Data Lake, and Azure Data Factory as the central data ingestion and transformation engine.

The Results

The eviction notice from the client’s current provider put them at risk of critical failure of their IT environment, impacting global operations. The client embraced the moment as an opportunity to not only address the immediate challenge but also to modernize its IT operations. The decision to migrate to Azure proved to yield significant business value for the business. The migration resulted in cost savings of $1.5 million, while reducing IT capital expenditure budgets by $4.3 million over a 5-year timeframe by moving to Azure. Beyond the financial benefits, by partnering with 3Cloud to move to Azure provided the client with enhanced business agility and continuity for global operations across Europe, Asia, and the Americas, while enabling the company to more effectively expand into new markets. Notably, the initiative also contributed to an environmental impact, with a 58% reduction in the client’s carbon footprint for IT workloads, equating to an annual reduction of 88 metric tons of carbon emissions.

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