Client story Strategic Cloud Adoption, Risk & ROI Planning
REIWA wanted to reduce capex expenditure and scale in the cloud. Insight team migrated web portal, CRM and business apps to Azure, significantly reducing costs for the client and enabling the Azure PaaS capabilities for optimising their business apps.
By Insight Editor / 21 Nov 2018 / Topics: Data center Hybrid cloud
Facts at a glance
Client industry:
Real Estate
Challenge:
The client looked to move to the cloud in order to scale and run its web, CRM and business apps more cost effectively.
Solution:
- Migration of web portal, CRM and business apps to Azure
- Migration of DR datacentre
- StorSimple appliance for storage archiving
Results:
- Significant cost savings by decommissioning their co-located datacentre
- Reduction in capital expenditure
- Ability to optimise their apps with Azure PaaS
Solution area:
Insight’s Digital Innovation solutions help clients digitally transform their business operations to remain competitive.
The concept and the challenge
Cloud migration for a 100-year-old real estate company
REIWA was looking to move its high traffic property search portal, reiwa.com, to a new environment that could take advantage of cloud computing for reduced cost and improved performance.
The solution needed to be:
• Resilient – eliminate single points of failure
• Cost effective – when compare to on-premises investments
• Scalable – to meet current and future demand whilst maintaining the required performance
• Support incremental analytical services
The solution
Seamless migration approach
Microsoft Azure was selected based on the end-to-end Proof of Concept developed by Insight which covered not only the technical architecture but also addressed risk management and Total Cost of Ownership analysis, providing the confidence to proceed with the solution.
The project included migrating the reiwa.com portal, CRM and bespoke applications; a critical differentiator for REIWA, who provides a comprehensive repository of property listings and critical services for real estate agents.
"Migration of the workloads from DR datacentre and the setup of a StorSimple appliance for archiving storage from an end of life SAN was also completed as part of the engagement."
Insight proceeded with a phased approach to ensure seamless migration with zero service impact whilst the underlying core infrastructure was set up. Compute infrastructure was first created and then integrated with existing application stack to create a hybrid environment that was facilitated by Azure Traffic Manager. Once all the required testing and validation was completed, the existing application stack was decommissioned and then the solution was completely running on Microsoft Azure.
Another great outcome
Cloud transformation for improved agility & cost savings
“This program of transformation has resulted in the decommissioning of our co-located production data centre, saving significant costs, and avoiding significant capital expenditure”, explains Michael Bailey, Executive Manager ICT, REIWA
Today, REIWA is running workloads across three critical applications and the client is very pleased with the technical capabilities and the commercial predictability of Microsoft Azure over the first year of operation.
"REIWA have also seen benefits in improved agility, performance and operational efficiency through moving to Microsoft Azure."
Insight’s thought leadership during the engagement can be demonstrated by identifying how REIWA could optimise their application using Azure’s Platform-as-a-Service capabilities to process over 1 million images per month, that was previously achieved using virtual machines and involved duplication of these images to ensure the required results. Insight ensured REIWA staff were also up-skilled as part of the process to enable them the confidence to operate their new solution on Microsoft Azure after the completion of the project.
