Case Studies & Success Stories

Explore real-world examples of successful Azure migrations, with detailed context, challenges, solutions, and outcomes.

Example 1: Retail Company Rehosting

  • Background: A mid-sized retail company operated a legacy e-commerce platform hosted on-premises, facing frequent outages and high maintenance costs. The IT team had limited cloud experience and a tight migration timeline due to expiring data center contracts.
  • Challenge:
    • Aging hardware and unsupported software.
    • High operational costs and limited scalability during peak sales.
    • Need to minimize downtime and risk during migration.
  • Solution:
    • Conducted an initial assessment using Azure Migrate to inventory VMs and dependencies.
    • Chose a Rehost (lift-and-shift) strategy, moving VMs and databases to Azure IaaS with minimal changes.
    • Used Azure Site Recovery for seamless VM migration and failback testing.
    • Implemented Azure Backup and Azure Monitor for post-migration resilience and visibility.
  • Outcome:
    • Reduced infrastructure costs by 30%.
    • Improved scalability and disaster recovery capabilities.
    • Achieved migration with less than 2 hours of downtime.
    • Enabled future modernization by establishing a cloud foundation.

Example 2: SaaS Provider Refactoring

  • Background: A SaaS provider delivered a monolithic web application to hundreds of clients, but struggled with slow release cycles, scaling issues, and high support overhead.
  • Challenge:
    • Monolithic architecture hindered feature releases and bug fixes.
    • Manual scaling led to performance bottlenecks during customer onboarding.
    • Security and compliance requirements were increasing.
  • Solution:
    • Performed an application assessment and identified key services for refactoring.
    • Adopted a Refactor strategy, breaking the monolith into microservices using Azure App Service and Azure SQL Database.
    • Leveraged Azure DevOps for CI/CD automation and Azure Key Vault for secrets management.
    • Integrated Azure Application Gateway and Azure Security Center for enhanced security and monitoring.
  • Outcome:
    • Accelerated deployment cycles from monthly to weekly.
    • Improved reliability and reduced support tickets by 40%.
    • Achieved better resource utilization and cost efficiency.
    • Enhanced compliance posture with built-in Azure security features.

Example 3: Financial Services Assessment

  • Background: A financial services firm needed to migrate sensitive workloads to Azure while meeting strict regulatory and data residency requirements.
  • Challenge:
    • Ensuring compliance with industry regulations (e.g., GDPR, PCI DSS).
    • Data residency and encryption requirements for customer data.
    • Zero tolerance for downtime during migration.
  • Solution:
    • Used Azure Migrate and the Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) to assess workloads, risks, and compliance gaps.
    • Designed a migration plan with staged cutovers and extensive testing.
    • Leveraged Azure Policy, Azure Blueprints, and Azure Security Center to enforce compliance and governance.
    • Employed Azure Database Migration Service for secure, validated data transfer.
  • Outcome:
    • Achieved regulatory compliance and passed external audits.
    • Migrated critical workloads with zero unplanned downtime.
    • Improved data security and monitoring with Azure-native tools.
    • Gained agility to respond to new business and regulatory needs.

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