Village Roadshow ditches data centres for Microsoft Azure

Microsoft has added new customers to its cloud platform following the announcement of two new Azure regions in Canberra.

Village Roadshow, the Australian entertainment brand behind film studio and Hollywood co-financier Village Roadshow Pictures is moving to Azure, having recently closed its co-located data centres, and moving its workloads, including SAP on Azure to the cloud.

The company, which holds a diversified portfolio of assets including theme parks, cinemas, film distribution and film production, noted its business was kept running by a "complex collection of information systems". 

"It’s critical that everything is tightly integrated and operates smoothly. SAP is at the heart of this, as it gathers corporate information and interfaces with many other systems. Across the VRL group, there are about 100 unique interfaces connecting 30 separate systems to the SAP core systems," the company said. 

Village Roadshow worked with SAP-to-Azure migration specialist BNW Consulting in partnership with CNI to perform the setup and migration and said it had enjoyed 100-percent uptime since the move. CNI will continue to support Village Roadshow's Azure environment through its Cloud Team Managed Services division.

Queensland-based investment firm QIC also made the shift to Azure, with its previous basic IT infrastructure holding back growth as the firm expanded to new regions. Melbourne-based Microsoft partner MOQdigital facilitated the migration, with solutions director Scott McPherson calling QIC a “dream partner”.

“QIC are a dream partner when it comes to cloud transformation because they have built their business strategy around growth and Azure is the perfect vehicle for that transformation. The business has truly committed to modernising its end-to-end infrastructure which will only have a positive impact on the clients they serve,” he said.

Microsoft earlier this month revealed its two new Azure data centres in the Australian capital in a major investment targeted at luring more Australian government agencies into its cloud while helping partners bid for public sector work.

The company will go live with the new regions, which are based in Canberra Data Centres' Hume and Fyshwick facilities, in the first half of 2018. The new regions join Microsoft’s existing Australian data centres in Sydney and Melbourne, taking the total number of global Azure regions to 42.

Microsoft is actively seeking a higher data classification rating from the Australian Securities Directorate, in order to be certified to host sensitive government data. Only two cloud providers are currently certified to handle Protected data, Vault Systems and Sliced Tech, which was No.1 in the 2015 CRN Fast50.