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“To help reduce risk and business impact we took a phased approach to the workload migrations, while giving our professionals a high-availability environment based on the secure Microsoft Azure platform.”       – CIO, Global Construction Firm

The Challenge

This global leader in commercial general contracting and construction was undergoing a multi-year program to migrate their business applications to Microsoft Azure. Critical to this migration was ensuring the firm’s core construction management application had no business impact during the migration. With a pending lease renewal at their Arizona data center, the IT team was tasked to “fast-track” the cloud migration and turned to Align to lead the program over an aggressive five-month time frame. 

Our Solution

For projects of this size and complexity, Align starts with the process of developing a current state understanding of the environments and application workloads. This first phase leads nicely into our future state exercise, where Align Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) collaborate with client infrastructure, development, and architecture teams to develop a comprehensive solution of migrating workloads to the Azure Cloud. Our process is that of an agile scrum style approach for gathering requirements, understanding business constraints and workload dependencies with the objective of developing a future state design and migration execution plan. Key areas included:

  • Developed highly available and secure Azure cloud design
  • Analyze current state and leveraged Azure Migrate to analyze and optimize workloads
  • Utilized Azure Site Recovery (ASR) to perform zero-downtime migrations
  • Consolidated over 400 databases and utilized Azure's DBaaS

The Results

$3M Total Cost Ownership Savings
300 Servers Migrated
100% Reduction in Data Center Footprint

In less than five months’ time, Align was able to design, plan and execute the IT transformation of workloads allowing the client to avoid significant spend and reduce their future operational run rate

  • Implemented Meraki, Any Connect and Azure MPLS Express route technologies
  • Migrated over 300 servers, supporting 80 applications and hundreds of end-users to Azure
  • Consolidated over 400 databases and used Azure's DBaaS allowing for high availability and improved resiliency
  • Deployed a highly available Active Directory (AD) sites to provide efficient replication and authentication topology
  • Migrated the core business application that supports all of the business with hundreds of external vendor interfaces to Azure cloud
  • TCO (Total Cost Ownership) saving of over a five year period calculated to an approximate saving of $3,000,000 with a 100% reduction in data center footprint

 

DON'T MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY TO SAVE YOUR COMPANY MILLIONS.

“A well-planned Data Center Consolidation is one of the best ways to demonstrate IT’s positive impact on your company’s bottom line.” 

Speak with a Migrations Program Manager at Align, for a clear, no-nonsense review of the steps you’ll need to take for a successful Data Center Consolidation.

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