Comprehensive operation of the company in the cloud

How and why it all started

The customer made an extensive and comprehensive tender. One that covered almost all imaginable areas of IT infrastructure and services in a company with several thousand employees and medicine factories. Its goal was to find one supplier / system integrator that could cover all the necessary IT areas. It is necessary to mention that there is no company in the Czech market that can cover everything. Therefore, a consortium of several specialized subcontractors in individual areas was created – and that was covered by the system integrator. In the tender, we faced competition from several multinational IT suppliers from abroad. The tender was assessed by the parent company, whose headquarters are abroad. In the end we won because we were able to cover the entire portfolio of services required, demonstrated speed and flexibility during the tender, and offered competitive price conditions.

The customer’s objective and motivation

Due to the separation of the company from a large international holding, which concentrated most of IT services and infrastructure in their data centres, extensive migration of IT infrastructure and IT services in the cloud environment was required. A secondary motivator was the status of obsolete infrastructure for key SAP systems that were needed to change.

How the service was deployed

After the announcement of the winning tender, project teams on the customer side, system integrator and individual subcontractors, were established almost immediately. An essential element in planning was a predetermined deadline of migration (hard-closing), which was exactly 9 months from the first project meeting. Specialists and IT architects from DataSpring contributed significantly in describing migration procedures and standards that applied throughout the implementation – DataSpring played a key role in migration.

How the opportunity arose

We became part of the project thanks to an overarching system integrator who had worked for the customer as an IT service provider for a long time, and who chose us as a major infrastructure subcontractor thanks to our modern data centres, wide range of cloud services, and good previous experience.

Customer experience, service benefits

From the beginning, we received positive feedback from the customer and our main covering partner, because we were able to handle a large number of requests in a short time, and had IT specialists who were able to solve problems conceptually and quickly.

The customer has contractually secured high flexibility in the range of services they intensively use. This enables them to expand and reduce the number of services from month to month, without the need for investment or calculating their return several years ahead. They can flexibly determine the scope of services they wish to be subscribed to according to current projects. They have SLAs and teams of professionals from all subcontractors who provide maximum support. Thanks to the possibilities of data centres and hybrid solutions, they are able to optimize IT costs and predict them with great accuracy – according to a comprehensive price list and a catalogue of services tailored to their needs in the tender.

Which DataSpring services does the customer use?

Due to the limited migration time and the customer's very limited local infrastructure, the central migration model was "cloud first", i.e., everything that could be migrated to the cloud was migrated. The customer used a wide portfolio of our services (from standard IaaS, i.e. computing power and disk space) for hundreds of virtual servers, through platform services such as SQLaaS, where we manage dozens of SQL servers and backup services with specially defined backup policies. We also manage its central network infrastructure in the cloud, including border firewalls, connections with MPLS and SD-WAN providers, security services such as web filtering for several thousand users, and log management. In our data centres, the customer also uses housing for systems that are difficult to place in a shared environment (typically Oracle databases and SAP systems). However, even these parts of its IT infrastructure are integrated into one functional unit, thanks to our disk arrays and network infrastructure.