Centric Consulting implements Microsoft Azure as the best Cloud solution to lower costs and support for a Hybrid Cloud architecture.
Our Client is a prominent executive search firm and leadership consulting company serving the healthcare, higher education, academic medicine, life sciences, information technology, and nonprofit industries.
A Need for Insight into Cloud Computing Services
Aware of the Cloud’s enhanced innovation, flexibility, and scalability, the Client wanted to migrate its On-Premises instance of its executive search platform into the Cloud. The firm’s IT specialists needed a partner to guide them on their journey.
Centric Consulting worked with the Client in the past, a partnership that includes selecting software and launching the firm’s successful executive search platform. Continuing the positive relationship nurtured over the last six years, the Client commissioned Centric to perform a Cloud Migration Assessment for its executive search application, to determine a Cloud solution that would meet all of its needs:
- The ability to relocate data from the United States to international locations, such as Canada
- Consolidation of multiple software instances, both On-Premise and Software as a Service (SaaS), into a single Cloud instance
- Minimal to no performance degradation
- Strong Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) capabilities
- Adherence to security best patterns and practices
- Preservation of integrations with On-Premise systems
- Cost-effectiveness and ease of administration
Enter Centric: Navigating the Cloud with a Needs-Based Assessment
Centric first embarked upon the three-week Cloud Migration Assessment by measuring the readiness of the Client’s workflow application, working in tandem with the client’s IT specialists. To ascertain the best solution, Centric assessed a variety of factors, including On-Premise vs. Cloud services, regulatory compliance, account management, network topology, storage considerations, business continuity, and disaster recovery. Based on the need for flexibility and cost savings, Centric verified that a Cloud solution would be the most effective way to meet the Client’s requirements.
Centric then evaluated several Cloud service providers based on fitness, performance, cost, and ease of administration, while always keeping the client’s needs and expectations top of mind. Centric’s experts eventually narrowed down their selection to two: Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
The Results: An Azure Approach
After weighing all the data gathered during its three-week-long assessment of needs and evaluation of alternatives, Centric identified Microsoft Azure as the best Cloud platform for this client’s situation due to its solution fitness, lower costs and support for a Hybrid Cloud architecture.
The proposed solution especially benefited from Microsoft Azure’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities to minimize infrastructure administration costs. Our approach would move the Client’s entire software infrastructure to Microsoft Azure with no loss of network connectivity to its On-Premise resources or existing integrations.
