Logan Finance invests in their future with a modern, scalable Azure cloud infrastructure

SHI performed a full migration to Azure on an extremely tight deadline – and with no unplanned downtime.

Challenge:

For the past 73 years, Logan Finance have prided themselves on being “The Agency of Non-Agency™,” maintaining a deep connection to their community and providing an exceptional level of customer service.

Business was booming and they had doubled their employee count in just 6 months. Their problem? IT was greatly understaffed, with little cloud expertise and an archaic data center infrastructure that wasn’t ready to scale.

To manage their growing business and continue supporting an increasingly modernized customer base, they needed to evolve their technology backbone. Logan Finance knew a cloud-based IT infrastructure could help them meet their transformation goals, but their existing partner was slowing them down. Having worked with SHI during a previous role, Logan Finance’s VP of IT enlisted our help.

Solution:

SHI outlined a plan to leverage Microsoft Azure. Our goal was to improve performance, reliability, and scalability, and establish preventative security and governance policies to maintain the customer’s compliance.

But as soon as Logan Finance’s existing managed service provider (MSP) learned SHI would be modernizing their cloud environment, they shut off access to the account and gave the customer a four-week window before their subscriptions expired.

Luckily, SHI built an entirely new Azure environment and migrated all pertinent data before the account closed – with no unplanned downtime. Before the project started, Logan Finance’s executives asked their VP of IT how much downtime they should expect. Based on his previous experience with SHI services, he was able to confidently (and correctly) answer “zero.”

SHI built an Azure environment that could handle the most breakneck growth and stringent security requirements, with highlights including:

• Increased security control and user productivity via Azure Virtual Desktop
• A business continuity plan, allowing for recovery within 24 hours of a ransomware attack
• Automated extraction, transformation, and loading of data into their SQL database via Azure Data Factory
• Meaningful data insights and reporting via an intuitive PowerBI frontend
• Data consolidation across multiple business applications, streamlining user workflows
• Repetitive task automation and increased development speed via Terraform and declarative IAC
• Automated patching and governance via CI/CD Pipelines

Outcome:

SHI’s Azure solution decreased the customer’s monthly cloud bill by 25%. And when the customer ran a third-party audit of their security posture, the auditor reported zero identified risks.

Logan Finance can now invest in staff and onboard new customers knowing their environment can scale with their growth. They can now also bring data into their decision-making, leveraging PowerBI and other Azure tools to understand their business and customers in new ways.