The client is a U.S.-based cargo airline that provides contracted air cargo, from ACMI (Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance and Insurance) arrangements to full service, to hundreds of cities on six continents. Maintaining a global grid of cargo planes means coordinating a worldwide network of employees, complying with international delivery laws and meeting clients' shipping deadlines every day. The company has hundreds of employees around the globe and a Microsoft 365 estate of more than 500 seats.

The airline's operations depend on coordinating a worldwide network of employees while complying with international delivery laws and meeting clients' shipping deadlines. To grow its remote teams effectively, it needed to optimize its Microsoft 365 investment, secure its remote workforce and improve the end-user experience.

The company also wanted to go further with modernization by migrating its SQL server and several other workloads from on-premises infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. Moving digital workloads to the cloud is a very different exercise from flying physical freight, and it called for an experienced partner with the skills to use Azure efficiently without incurring unnecessary costs.

Before migrating, the airline needed answers to a set of practical questions: how to ensure a secure infrastructure with a large remote workforce, how to design an Azure environment that fit its specific business needs, which workloads to move and in what priority, how long the migration would take, what ongoing support would look like and how to maximize its cloud investment to unlock its innovative potential.

TierPoint's cloud experts started with a thorough assessment and produced a customized roadmap for the migration, and the airline engaged TierPoint for an end-to-end solution covering the entire process.

For the Azure migration, TierPoint built a modern, tailored cloud environment that adhered to the Azure Well-Architected Framework for security, reliability, performance, cost and operational efficiency. A tactical, tiered migration process minimized both risk and downtime, including for the existing SQL environment. The new environment improved the airline's overall security posture with advanced threat protection, proactive monitoring with real-time alerts and native Azure firewalls. It also gave the company the ability to scale up or down with the click of a button to meet shifting workload demands, along with actionable data to adjust cloud spend as needed.

TierPoint also took on management of the airline's 500+ seat Microsoft 365 investment through its Managed Microsoft 365 service. This gave the company's dispersed teams uninterrupted use of the entire Microsoft 365 suite, access to TierPoint's Secure Workforce specialists for a review of its security posture and optimization of licensing, and robust Microsoft 365 backup protocols through Metallic, including mailbox resiliency.

• SQL server and several other workloads migrated from on-premises infrastructure to Microsoft Azure
• Tiered migration minimized risk and downtime, including for the existing SQL environment
• Improved security posture with advanced threat protection, proactive monitoring, real-time alerts and native Azure firewalls
• Increased productivity across dispersed teams through uninterrupted use of the full Microsoft 365 suite
• 500+ Microsoft 365 seats managed by TierPoint, with licensing optimized and Metallic backup covering mailbox resiliency
• Ability to scale up or down on demand, with actionable data to adjust cloud spend