A Successful Migration

Santos CMI is a construction services company that used to operate its Datacenter 100% on-premises to provide services to its users. Here they had deployed solutions from different vendors. The company had a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft that included applications for servers and end-users as do many companies in the industry. 

Unfortunately, due to the current economic situation, the company had to dispense with a large part of its staff, but due to the inflexibility of this type of contract, it had to continue paying for the licenses it had acquired. 

Additionally, some servers in the company began to reach their useful life and Santos CMI had to decide on renewing its hardware or moving to another type of platform. Meanwhile, some software licenses, especially Windows Server were close to their end of support and the update of these was a cause for concern. 

Project Requirements 

Santos CMI requested the advice of Cloudtivity to analyze the possibility of moving its servers to Microsoft Azure.  The company wanted to be able to have the flexibility it enabled to create servers on-demand, but also to solve its software licensing problem. 

Also, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Santos was required to facilitate remote work for its users, which meant allowing them to remotely connect to the company’s servers to make use of the services deployed there. 

Performed Tasks 

Cloudtivity worked with Santos CMI beginning with analyzing the current situation, pointing out the benefits of working with Azure and Microsoft 365 and the requirements to adopt these platforms. This included prioritizing the workloads to be migrated and training needed to get started with these solutions. 

Migration tasks included hot replication of designated servers and accompaniment for testing before replacing their production environment. In addition, new servers were deployed for those services that needed to update their operating system. In other cases, some services were replaced by native Azure solutions or by Microsoft 365. 

Current Situation 

Currently, Santos CMI has moved much of its server infrastructure (Windows and Linux) to Azure and other services to Microsoft 365.  The company has the flexibility to create, resize or eliminate services on demand and to purchase licenses at any time.  

This has allowed its users to work with no hassles in a hybrid scenario during the pandemic and the company can significantly save costs thanks to the flexibility of the licensing model.