By Steve Solomon / 29 Nov 2018 / Topics: Hybrid cloud Microsoft Azure
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Federal government
Size of company:
45,000 employees
Challenge:
A major department of the U.S. government needed a more agile and cost-effective solution for its data center hardware approaching end of life.
Solution:
- Application assessment
- Microsoft Azure
- Hybrid cloud training
Results
- Reduced resource allocations by 75%
- Decreased costs by 60%
- Increased scalability and security
- Improved disaster recovery
Solution area:
Insight’s Cloud + Data Center Transformation solutions help clients improve data center availability, performance and efficiency.
A cabinet-level department of the U.S. government faced major performance and reliability issues with its on-premise data center hardware.
Lack of funding made it difficult for the department to upgrade its technology — which resulted in a ripple effect of inefficiency across the department’s agencies, offices and bureaus. Many of them had different and complex IT configurations.
The organization wanted to retire end-of-life hardware and satisfy the federal government’s mandate for cloud migration and data center consolidation. It knew cloud services could provide better efficiency, resiliency, availability and survivability related to disaster recovery.
With experience in the government sector, Insight’s Cloud + Data Center Transformation team had the knowledge base and expertise to help. We understood a successful cloud migration for the department would involve 80% planning and 20% execution.
Before making recommendations, Insight Public Sector performed a comprehensive analysis of the client’s applications — with zero downtime — to determine which were suitable for migration. We actively engaged with individual stakeholders within the department to identify the key problem areas.
Our team mapped out which applications were still functional, which could be combined and which could be eliminated — ultimately eradicating more than 100 redundant and underperforming applications.
The analysis revealed the department needed to move away from its outdated data center to a hybrid cloud environment — combining the data center with the public cloud — to achieve greater efficiency, security and performance across its offices and bureaus.
Insight built out a stronger disaster recovery capability for the client and provided a dedicated path to Microsoft Azure with load balancing, traffic manager, virtual network, site recovery and improved security.
The client experienced:
Leveraging Azure enabled us to reduce the number of applications used by the department and its agencies from 222 to 117. Resource allocations and costs also dramatically decreased — by 75% and 60%, respectively.
To help the client adapt to the new hybrid cloud model and the IT staff navigate the modifications, we followed up with on-site training. Our team also explained how Cloud + Data Center Transformation solutions could be used to tackle future productivity challenges.
The client is thrilled with the solution, which not only delivers powerful results, but has also reduced complexity and costs.
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