We recently helped one of our customers move their entire virtual infrastructure to Microsoft Azure . They approached us with the simple request of the need to save money. They were currently maintaining identical VMware clusters in two data centers (one for disaster recovery) and they wanted to bring their IT spend more in line with their overall efforts to streamline their operation.

We suggested a forklift of their environment to Azure and helped them work through the pricing exercise to determine how much of a cost savings they could expect to see. This required us to engineer things such as the virtual machine conversion from VMware to Azure to determine monthly pricing, which included estimating IOPS, bandwidth requirements, CPU/Memory and disk space for each virtual machine and coming up  with a new method for users to connect securely to the environment. Once we had a precise idea of what the cloud environment might look like we were then able to leverage our Microsoft partnership to gain additional savings, which ended up being close to a $4k reduction in monthly costs.

After demonstrating a clear monetary advantage, we went ahead and moved them to the cloud, with very little interruption in service.

Moving some applications like email and file services or moving your entire IT footprint to the cloud is making more financial sense as cloud services pricing is increasingly more competitive. If you are considering any type of cloud service, feel free to give us a shout and we can help you explore the options and see what fits best for your business!