Manufacturing company finds long overdue results and 60% savings with SHI and Azure

The customer finally found some lasting results with the help of SHI’s Cloud Managed Services and Azure.

Challenge:

A 40-year-old global manufacturing company based in New Jersey had existing Microsoft Azure infrastructure deployed on costly Azure classic resources and knew they needed a change. The customer had worked with several other managed services providers (MSPs) to gain efficiencies and make improvements to their service delivery capabilities, but they still didn’t have the results they were looking for.

Solution:

SHI Cloud Managed Services assisted the customer in understanding their challenges with their existing MSPs and created a roadmap for future state architecture and a more mature operations model.

Within six months, SHI cloud architects simplified the existing architecture by migrating the customer’s application components from their traditional SQL Server running on Azure Virtual Machines to Azure SQL Database Managed Service.

Outcome:

This solution delivered quick results and the manufacturing company is benefitting in five key ways:

• Security – Reduced surface area for patching risks, removed public access by requiring management access through new secure VPN, and implemented role-based access instead of shared access.
• Reliability – Migrated from Azure Classic to Azure ARM, implemented global traffic routing with Azure Traffic Manager for future HA/DR, and upgraded SQL environment to a modern and better supported platform while implementing immutable design standards to create governance and standards for operations.
• Performance efficiency – Moved from Gen 1 to Gen 5 hardware for better performance, improved app performance from five-second average end-to-end transaction time down to two seconds, and implemented autoscaling automation to properly react to variable traffic volume.
• Cost optimization – Reduced overall Azure operating cost by 60%, reduced licensing cost by decreasing number of Virtual Machines, modernized instances to provide more CPU cores for less cost, and auto-scaled down web server instances during low traffic volume.
• Operational excellence – Automated Windows and SQL patching with managed instances, reduced planned headcount growth by offloading high volume/lower value work to SHI support, and resolved core code execution problems by implementing App Insights for deep application analytics.