Three-year cloud roadmap for a Chicago manufacturer
A large Chicagoland manufacturer of custom commercial LED lighting faced overdue infrastructure upgrades, hyper-growth and a long list of legacy applications. Storcom built a three-year public cloud migration strategy with its Cloud Enablement Roadmap, mapping how ERP, CAD and plant-floor devices interact. The company now has a clear plan, network upgrades underway and apps being rebuilt cloud-native.
Published . Client details withheld at the client’s request.
The challenge
The company’s on-premises compute and storage were due for major upgrades, and IT wanted better availability for the business applications it hosted. Leadership saw the public cloud, backed by the right network upgrades, as the best long-term home for those applications.
The business was going through hyper-growth at the same time.
Manufacturing added its own complications. Plant-floor devices such as handheld scanners change how applications communicate once those applications move off-premises.
A large number of legacy applications also had to be upgraded and rewritten as cloud-native during the same period.
What Storcom did
We were hired to build a three-year cloud migration strategy using Storcom’s Cloud Enablement Roadmap, a consulting methodology backed by industry-standard and custom data-collection tools.
We assessed which legacy applications could be rewritten as cloud-native. The main ERP system could not be ported to cloud-native at first, so we planned to move it off-premises as a lift and shift.
We mapped how every application interacted, including the CAD systems the designers use, then modeled how each would move to the public cloud and what the migration would cost while on-premises and off-premises devices kept talking to each other.
The outcome
- A concise three-year strategy that supports the CIO’s vision for the direction of the company.
- Major network upgrades, carried out by Storcom, to provide the resiliency needed once core applications are hosted in the public cloud.
- Legacy applications being rebuilt as cloud-native.
- An initial development environment for the current ERP system, which moves into the public cloud after full testing.
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