Leading F&B Company moves its IT infrastructure to Azure for powering their innovative and ambitious growth plans

Being a leader in the F&B with a mission to perfect and deliver the best of brand experience not once or twice but continually, nothing can be left to chance and certainly not the IT infrastructure. With a workforce of 500+ associates and a distribution network spread across the US, they had ambitious growth plans.

Without nimble, scalable, transparent, and independent computing, networking, and storage resources, working in tandem, helping you quickly respond to changing business requirements, you may find it hard to sail through.

And that led them to engage Cloud IQ Technologies to assess, recommend, and implement the right cloud solution.

Customer Challenges

While the business was growing at breakneck speed, so were the challenges of IT which form the crux of business operations.

After more than a decade of operation on on-premises hosting, they were faced with the need for a more secure, scalable, and cost-effective platform to accommodate its rapid growth. They wanted their IT team to spend 70% of their time on new initiatives and only 30% on routine maintenance activities, yet that wasn’t happening.

After a thorough analysis, the company decided to move part of its IT infrastructure to the cloud.  When the decision was made, they engaged CloudIQ Technologies to assist with identifying the options for the migration to Cloud. Based on CloudIQ’s recommendation, they decided to move to Azure and contracted CloudIQ to handle both the migration and the ongoing management for its Azure environment.

CloudIQ Solution

They had a rapid timeline for moving most of the infrastructure to Azure, as they wanted the process to be completed before other dependent application upgrades.

CloudIQ came up with a plan to gradually migrate the infrastructure with the domain controllers, file servers, and non-mission-critical systems migrated first followed by the migration of mission-critical systems.

Following this methodology gave good insights into the improvements in process and infrastructure that had to be implemented and ensured that the migration of the ERP system was smooth without any glitches.

Additionally, Cloud IQ is providing ongoing services, including configuring data backup and recovery, designing file server backup, identifying Azure tools for networks, security, storage, network design, and security, and overall design/configuration of Azure network, storage, compute, and security.

Azure optimization and planning: During the migration, a key challenge was determining how to optimize Azure resources for price and performance. CloudIQ helped with the evaluation and selection of Azure instances, factoring in required speed, storage, bandwidth, and CPU.

Customer Impact

Worry-free IT management: With CloudIQ on board, they no longer need to handle tasks like server maintenance or hardware rotation, and with Azure, IT can scale resources up and down as needed. It now takes days to prepare an environment for a new application, instead of weeks.

More strategic use of IT staff: They outsource many functions already, and by adding Azure and CloudIQ, the company is further along the path of standardization and efficiency. Now, their IT team focuses on getting more important projects done, such as bringing all the remote offices into the voice network.

Power to Innovate and Grow: They strongly believe that Cloud will power their innovative and ambitious growth plans. They expect their nimble and scalable IT infrastructure will deliver several benefits apart from major cost savings such as:

• Increased efficiency and productivity leading to increased profitability
• Better time management and faster decision-making
• Greater resource sharing, monitoring, and control
• Increase information consistency and accuracy
• Anytime, anywhere access feature enabling information availability 24/7