Mountain resort modernizes legacy on-premises environment with automation and Microsoft Azure

A premier U.S. mountain resort, with 35,000+ corporate and seasonal employees, needed to meet security and compliance requirements with a cloud solution.

Challenge:

The client developed plans to modernize their on-premises environment by building and migrating to a cloud solution. They also decided to enable automation to meet security and compliance requirements.

This digital transformation began when the client created a data sciences team to analyze business data. This internal group intended to deploy Kubernetes containers with Terraform automation.

Unfortunately, they encountered several challenges, including:

• Lack of Terraform expertise.
• Inability to create secure automation processes or provide sufficient security for their cloud resources.
• Difficulties setting up their landing zone and supporting ongoing management of the environment.
• Division of responsibilities between developers and operations.
• Struggles moving from development to production.

Realizing their plans were a bit too ambitious to handle internally, they turned to SHI to help meet their security and compliance requirements.

Solution:

SHI stepped in to help the customer meet their needs with Terraform, which would allow them to run their environment in a cost-effective, secure, and efficient manner. By performing an in-depth technical analysis, SHI uncovered existing security gaps and took several steps to remediate.

First, we built a secure environment using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and used Terraform to codify cloud resource APIs into declarative configuration files. By leveraging these files to build, manage, and orchestrate infrastructures in the Azure public cloud, we could eliminate the possibility of human error.

With a new infrastructure in place, we imported existing Azure resources and deployed new resources into a stateful configuration, allowing the customer to manage the lifecycle of those resources until they are deprovisioned.

Using Azure DevOps, we provided version control and automation deployment to improve and accelerate resource deployment between the customer’s development and production environments.

Finally, SHI implemented Azure backup and disaster recovery solutions, leveraging Azure recovery services vault to achieve high availability and uphold a resilient environment for business continuity. The solution kept recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives within organizational limits.

Outcome:

This secure new environment allowed the customer to focus on their continuing digital transformation journey. SHI’s intervention enabled the client to enjoy:

SHI educated the customer about effective cloud road map development.

The client consolidated multiple physical environments into the Azure public cloud.

The new solution offers high availability and scalability to meet the client’s seasonal needs.

The client can quickly provision several infrastructures with minimal effort. They can also seamlessly launch applications, reducing time for provisioning underlying infrastructures.