Case Study: Commercial Property Specialist

Building a Strategic Partnership for Cloud Excellence: Transforming Operations and Driving Business Growth.

The Challenge

A leading commercial property specialist sought to maximise its cloud investment by leveraging Azure for secure, scalable, and efficient operations. With an ambitious vision to align its cloud usage with industry best practices, the company required an expert partner to provide actionable insights and ensure its cloud infrastructure could support both immediate operational needs and long-term growth.

The Solution

Phase 1:
Well-Architected Review and Health Check

In November 2023, we began by delivering a five-day expert review of the customer’s Azure environment. This initial engagement provided a comprehensive assessment of the platform’s alignment with best practices, identifying critical security gaps and inefficiencies in operational management. The findings underscored the need for a strategic shift to:

Enhance security measures.
Implement modern cloud management practices.
Develop a roadmap for deploying optimised Azure landing zones

Key Outcomes:

Identification of immediate security and operational risks.

Actionable recommendations to align Azure usage with the customer’s business strategy.

Phase 2:
Immediate Remediation Support

To address the urgent issues identified, we executed a focused five-day remediation project. This phase involved critical fixes, including:

Enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA).
Strengthening Azure Active Directory settings.
Revoking unnecessary database access to mitigate risks.

Key Outcomes:

Immediate improvement in security posture.

Enhanced control over user identity and access management.

Phase 3: Cloud Strategy Development

A 15-day engagement followed, involving targeted workshops on strategy, governance, security, and Identity and Access Management (IAM). Through collaborative sessions, we developed a robust cloud strategy tailored to the customer’s objectives of owning and efficiently managing its infrastructure.

Key Outcomes:

Clear roadmap for adopting industry-standard cloud methodologies.

Alignment of cloud operations with the customer’s business objectives.

A framework for transitioning to a cloud operating model.

Phase 4:
Azure Landing Zone Deployment and Workload Migration

Our partnership culminated in a 55-day project, later extended due to additional customer needs. This phase focused on modernising the Azure environment, including:

Deploying optimised landing zones.
Migrating Azure Files, SQL databases, and server workloads.
Supporting the deployment of a new application.
Consolidating resources to reduce sprawl and close down obsolete systems.

Key Outcomes:

Improved cloud spend visibility and operational efficiency.

Reduction of database costs by an estimated 50% through right-sizing.

Enhanced security and performance for mission-critical systems.

Transition to elastic storage, eliminating hardware constraints.

Empowerment of the customer’s CloudOps team to maintain best practices.

The Business Impact

Our tailored approach delivered transformative results:

Cost savings of approximately 50% on database operations.
Enhanced operational visibility and modernised skillsets within the IT team.
Reduced risk of data centre failure through cloud-based disaster recovery.
Increased agility and scalability to support future organisational growth

Next Steps

With a secure and efficient Azure environment in place, the customer is well-positioned to continue its cloud transformation journey. As a trusted partner, Expert Thinking remains committed to providing ongoing support to ensure seamless scalability and alignment with evolving business objectives.