Manufacturing Leader Replaces Traditional Managed Services with Microsoft 365 and Azure; Boosting Productivity

A Wintellisys Case Study: MANUFACTURING

The Challenge

Newberry Tanks was faced with the need to replace their servers with new technology.  In addition, the client was growing at approximately 25% per year and needed a dynamic infrastructure that could grow in response to demand.  

Newberry sought to replace its on-premise server and co-located server with a combination SaaS and Azure IaaS solution collectively.

They wanted to have a computing environment that could handle their growth, but they didn’t want to invest in server capacity that might not be needed. Of course, they realized that if they purchased hardware, there was the real prospect of replacing it all again in 4 or 5 years.

The Wintellisys Solution

Wintellisys proposed moving the on-premise Domain Controller, file server, and application stack to the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem.

Specifically, the two domains: 1 in expedient colo, and the on premise domain were consolidated and moved that functionality to Azure AD.  This created a significant cost and administration savings immediately.

The Sage CRM and ERP Systems were upgraded and migrated to an Azure VM in a secured and managed subscription.  Azure provides hosted servers based on the utilization of the server. This affords Newberry Tanks to deploy the servers and services they need, dynamically sized the way the business demands.

Today, they’ve expanded their line of business since deploying the service and easily expanded the server to meet their growing demands for a small incremental cost.

With the Wintellisys managed Azure workload, the client pays a monthly fee for the services they consume. They are not responsible for hardware or software operating system upgrades going forward.

In addition, the services can be replicated and moved to another data center in minutes in the event there is an issue with their primary server.

As a part of the service, their servers are imaged and stored in another data center eliminating the need to deploy a separate back up system and move the data off site.

Additionally, the use of the Microsoft 365 suite of services allows for the reinvention of their entire collaborative process.

Wintellisys migrated all of their files and groups to shared Team sites and Sharepoint. Now an employee is guaranteed to have their files no matter where they are working. 

Those files are protected from ransomware as there are revisions for each modification of the document.  The data is also replicated between multiple datacenters and is stored locally. 

Security was a big concern after several phishing attempts as ddos attacks from the outside. Wintellisys was able to implement conditional access leveraging  AD DS on the subscription and ensuring MFA for those users not in compliance or outside their traditional work environment.  The environment is constantly monitored by the Wintellisys monitoring staff.

Key Findings

IT decision-makers are looking to take advantage of new cloud functionality to improve the end user computing operations life cycle. Shifting requirements are causing IT professionals to consider alternative methods of sourcing and managing their hardware and services.

More than 90% of respondents expect to use the cloud in each facet of their device management operations within the next year.

Device deployment today is taxing and costly. The manual nature of provisioning and updating devices today means that every new OS and application release requires significant time and resources.

This issue is compounded by complex, time-consuming licensing activities like activation and asset management.

Modern IT involves leveraging the ease and flexibility of the cloud for device management. Moving the device operations life cycle to the cloud presents a massive opportunity that is of great interest to I&O decision-makers.

A transitional model — in which some devices are managed in the cloud and others via on-premises platforms — can make the migration easier and greatly improve IT efficiency, agility, productivity, and cost management.