Interactive takes Freedom Furniture to Azure

Managed services provider Interactive has been tapped by furniture and homewares retailer Freedom Furniture to facilitate its migration to Microsoft Azure.

Interactive was tapped for its CloudFlex delivery model, a scalable, pay-as-you-go offering that gives its customers access to a dedicated multi-cloud project team.

CloudFlex was brought in after Freedom’s in-house team ran into challenges surrounding architecture, security and increasing costs after building up the Azure environment in 2020.

Interactive said Freedom at the time was undergoing a number of changes within the company and the Azure migration was only one of several priorities, leading to stretched resources.

“Internally, we’re really busy. The business as a whole is undergoing a significant transformation, and Information Technology sits in the middle of that, resources were limited,” Freedom Furniture IT operations manager Daniel McMartin said.

"When we went to tender for the Azure project, Interactive hit the mark with what we were looking for. Not just price wise, but they literally ticked every box on our checklist."

McMartin added CloudFlex was “exactly” what Freedom Furniture needed, allowing the company to optimise resource management and eliminate waste. The company would also work in sprints and gain visibility over backlogs in work, as well as full control of prioritising and sequencing tasks.

"CloudFlex provides us with blocks of time, and each block of time can be spent working on whatever we want. It has enabled us to do a couple of other things when we've been ahead of schedule,” McMartin said.

“One of the network engineers spent a bit of time doing up an SD WAN document for us, which was completely outside the project scope, but it was a huge help to us."

Through CloudFlex, Interactive said it provided Freedom with a project manager, who assisted with end-to-end project delivery, as well as solve other technology issues.

The process involved a cost optimisation assessment for the cloud architecture, which was documented through a report from Interactive that includes recommendations on compliance, governance and security remediations.

“Interactive is an extension of our team, always taking the time to transfer knowledge and mentor us. The process has really enabled our team to tackle challenges that could come up down the line,” McMartin said.

“Interactive [also helped] provide expertise in specific areas that allowed us to deliver cost-effectively in a condensed timeline with improved quality.”