The client is a large U.S.-based distributor of industrial products and a leading manufacturer of plastic piping systems, with more than 60 offices across the United States. The company had relied on an on-premises IT infrastructure for years, and its legacy systems were approaching the end of their lifecycle. It did not have the internal IT expertise to run a cloud environment on an ongoing basis, which shaped its decision to look for an outside migration and management partner.

The manufacturer's legacy on-premises systems were approaching the end of their lifecycle, and maintaining that infrastructure had become a massive undertaking. The company had to decide how best to meet its organizational needs in terms of cost, timing and available resources.

While weighing the decision, it recognized that legacy systems are not only costly and time-consuming to maintain; they become dated, hinder innovation and make it harder to keep up with customer demands. Migrating to the cloud, however, looked intimidating without the technical expertise to untangle its complexity. The company also lacked the internal IT expertise to handle ongoing management of a cloud environment once it was in place.

What it needed was a team of cloud experts who could assess the infrastructure, create a transition framework, meet its workload needs so the move was seamless, and then provide ongoing management of the new environment.

The manufacturer engaged TierPoint for both migration and management. The first step was transitioning more than 600 seats to Microsoft 365, which gave staff easy access to productivity tools for improved collaboration and communication. That successful migration led the company to expand its Microsoft ecosystem with Azure.

TierPoint then carried out a comprehensive five-week cloud assessment and built a roadmap for the Azure migration, designed to maximize efficiency and productivity while reducing costs. The resulting environment adheres to the Azure Well-Architected Framework for security, reliability, performance, cost and operational efficiency. The transition was planned for minimal risk and downtime, and the environment scales up or down as workload demands shift, uses robust data sets to adjust spending on the fly, and implements cloud-native security.

To keep drawing on TierPoint's cloud expertise, the company also enlisted TierPoint for ongoing management of its Azure environment. That service covers configuration management as the Azure system evolves, proactive monitoring to resolve issues quickly, expedited 24/7 Microsoft support, and knowledge of Azure's security capabilities for tackling cyber threats, including ransomware.

• More than 600 seats transitioned to Microsoft 365, improving collaboration and communication
• Five-week cloud assessment produced an Azure migration roadmap aligned to the Well-Architected Framework
• Internal teams freed from infrastructure and hardware management to focus on innovative, revenue-generating work
• Environment scales up or down on demand, with data-driven spending adjustments and cloud-native security
• Issues resolved quickly through proactive monitoring and expedited 24/7 Microsoft support under TierPoint's ongoing management