Challenge

A Fortune 500 consumer packaged goods (CPG) company needed to adapt Microsoft Azure Platform to better enable them for innovation while reducing costs associated with operating and maintaining servers, software, and networking devices. This shift would also allow them to scale their compute and storage capabilities up or down to better match capacity with business consumption.

Results

• Better enabled to deploy, destroy, suspend, and resize compute and storage capabilities automatically –within minutes instead of weeks or months – to meet demand.
• Eliminated high costs associated with periodic hardware refreshes, daily maintenance and support.
• New tools, development services and insights now available that drive innovation and competitive differentiation.

The Process

Assessed 

Azure security capabilities to ensure consistency with company requirements, particularly in relation to controlling access to confidential information.

Collaborated 

With the company’s network service provider to establish a dedicated private connection between the enterprise’s existing on-premise data center and Microsoft’s Azure data center.

Designed

The solution architecture of Azure features and functionality and their respective configurations for use across the enterprise.

Established 

A governance model and determined how Azure would be supported from a people perspective (i.e., regarding specific roles and responsibilities).

Facilitated 

Adoption of Azure PaaS across the organization via change management and pilots.

Conducted 

A cost, time, and resource comparison of deploying, operating and supporting an application in Azure PaaS versus the enterprise’s traditional model.

Additional Results

Better Resource Management

The company now uses only a small internal team to manage governance, ID and access, webmaster, and logical database, as many traditional IT roles (e.g., those involving the physical database, operating system, storage, hardware, security, network, and facilities) are managed by Microsoft, the cloud service provider. This gives the company greater control over quality as well as resource usage.