Private cloud migration for a finance company during COVID-19
A Chicago-based nonprofit finance company was partway into an Azure migration when COVID-19 emptied its downtown office and tightened budgets. Storcom, its DR and managed services provider for over 15 years, executed the DR plan instead and failed the full workload over to Storcom’s private cloud in one weekend, for less than Azure.
Published . Client details withheld at the client’s request.
The challenge
The company runs custom fund management software at the core of its business. Storcom had provided its disaster recovery and managed its systems for over 15 years.
As aging infrastructure came due for replacement, the CIO adopted a cloud-first strategy. We were building a Microsoft Azure tenant for the key systems running in the company’s downtown Chicago data center: Azure would host primary production, and new on-premises hardware would run less critical development systems. The company already used Microsoft Office 365 for email and collaboration.
Then COVID-19 arrived. With no one working in the office, keeping systems there was a serious risk. If something failed, no one could get to the infrastructure.
Moving the entire workload to Azure was also getting expensive. Building in the right redundancy and backups for a traditional infrastructure-as-a-service workload, rather than a cloud-native application, drove up the cost, and like every organization the company was feeling the financial constraints of the pandemic.
What Storcom did
The Azure tenant was ready, Azure Migrate was working and the networking was in place. Instead of continuing, we worked with the CIO on an alternative that solved the immediate problems for considerably less while keeping the flexibility and scalability of the cloud.
We moved the workload to Storcom’s private cloud in our data center in Chicago’s western suburbs, at a lower cost than the planned Azure build.
Rather than run a new migration, we executed the existing disaster recovery plan and failed over.
Technology: software-based replication, Storcom’s hosted private cloud infrastructure and Storcom’s WorkSpace Recovery VDI platform.
The outcome
- The failover ran over a single weekend to limit business impact. Critical systems came back online quickly, and the business opened as usual on Monday morning.
- The company’s entire workload now runs in a secure, managed private cloud in Storcom’s data center.
- Every remote user has full access to their systems.
- The CIO no longer has hardware to update and manage when work continues at the downtown Chicago offices.
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