Power tool accessories manufacturer and distributor Sheffield Group saw infrastructure costs drop by 30% shortly after completing a ‘lift and shift’ migration that moved its heavily automated warehousing operations into the cloud.
Completed by cloud specialist firm Cloud Made Simple (CMS) with the support of Ingram Micro, the migration proved transformative for the company, whose Australian operations distribute the company’s abrasive, cutting, drilling, measuring, and other tools under brand names including Alpha, Sterling, Austsaw, Tracer, Nextorch, and Euroboor.
Based in Boolaroo, outside Newcastle, 50-year-old Sheffield has just 65 staff and its core applications process thousands of product orders per day.
Increasingly frequent interconnectivity and reliability issues had made the modernisation of the platform ever more important over the years – yet its team of developers was so busy supporting the 50-year-old company’s in-house software tools that they couldn’t even contemplate migrating the systems to contemporary cloud platforms.
“Efficiency really comes into play with this kind of business,” CMS general manager of technology Casey Gordon explained, noting that the IT team has historically focused on optimising the movement of product through the supply chain through innovations such as automated picking lines, conveyor belts, printing, labelling, and logistics systems.
“A lot of their IT team is focused on continuing to push that to drive further efficiency,” Gordon continued.
“They would have the capability in-house to potentially handle the migration themselves, but it’s not where their time is best spent so they looked for a third party to manage that for them – so they can focus on the things that drive their growth.”
No escaping the cloud anymore
Sheffield’s cloud migration comes as cloud giants ramp up efforts to move smaller businesses onto their platforms, enlisting cloud partners to drive migrations using well integrated cloud services spanning the gamut of enterprise capabilities.
With Gartner recently forecasting that by 2028 cloud will shift from being a technology disruptor to being a necessary component for businesses to stay competitive – and warning that most businesses are still in the first two stages of the company’s five-stage maturity model – the imperative to embrace the cloud has never been stronger.
“Years into Australia’s digital transformation journey, the flexibility, scalability and cost effectiveness of cloud platforms has turned them into mission critical, strategic infrastructure for companies of all sizes,” said Phil Duke, general manager for the IaaS business with Ingram Micro – whose certification under the Infra and Database Migration to Microsoft Azure specialisation has kept it flat-out working with channel partners to enable clients’ digital transformation journeys.
“Our breadth and depth of experience have made us natural partners for service providers like Cloud Made Simple,” Duke said, “with whom we are regularly working closely to deliver significant outcomes for businesses of all kinds.”
Minimising risk from the start
To start its own migration, Sheffield went to market looking for a strategic partner and chose CMS to advise on the best cloud platform and migration strategy.
CMS and Ingram Micro laid out an enterprise architecture and migration plan that would use virtual machines (VMs) to move Sheffield’s heavily customised operations into Azure using related Microsoft platforms spanning business servers, productivity, security, identity management, and more.
An infrastructure audit grouped existing systems into workloads – for example, picking and ERP system workloads – while mapping of extensive technical interdependencies made it clear that the project needed to be a completed as a lift-and-shift migration.
“Given the interconnectivity of these systems, the on-premise warehousing systems and the automation systems, it was clear that it needed to all come across at once,” Gordon explained.
By developing a ‘run book’ spanning staff education, compliance checks, cloud training programs and other aspects of the move, CMS and Sheffield were able to plan every step of the migration while tapping Ingram Micro’s software licensing expertise to minimise the cost of the new environment.
The fact that Sheffield’s core systems were all based on Microsoft technologies streamlined the migration to Azure, meaning that the move was “just a matter of clicking and deploying [each VM],” Gordon said, “and that only takes 15 to 20 minutes.”
“A lot of it is around making sure everything works once you get into that environment,” he added. “It’s lift and shift, but we’re manipulating the environment as well – so we need to make sure that communication continues to work across all the different systems.”
CMS and Sheffield teams spent three months working in an isolated cloud instance to ensure the new environment supported Sheffield’s industrial equipment in the same way as it did in the past.
“It was good to be able to isolate and have run tests,” Gordon said, “so that we were really confident about the solution when we pushed the button.”
After a smooth migration, operational costs soon dropped by 30% compared to Sheffield’s previous environment, with reviews of licensing instances and system utilisation helping lower costs and the choice of short term, long term, or pay as you go cloud payment options improving visibility of operational costs.
“Once everybody is comfortable with the amount of resources needed for the environment to run,” Gordon said, “we can lock it in for three years – and then they really see the cost savings from there."
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