Moving with the cloud at scale: Inframon migrates enterprises to Azure with minimal downtime at scale using proprietary solutions

Cloud Transformation Specialists

How did a "born in the data center" company become a cloud transformation advisor? Inframon, a UK-based Microsoft partner, evolved from a Systems Integrator (SI) consulting firm to a recognized leader and one of the first adopters of the Clouds Solution Provider (CSP) program for Microsoft Azure.

Since becoming a Managed Service Provider (MSP), Inframon has more than doubled its revenue and company size. The Azure CSP business model enables Inframon to bring together Azure, trusted business partners, and its own expertise to provide customers with a complete seamless solution. “We embraced Azure,” said Gordon McKenna, CTO and co-founder of Inframon. “We became the first system integrator in the UK on the Azure Circle program, focusing on how we could create cloud scenarios for customers using both public and on-premises technology.”

Leaning into Azure CSP

As a systems integrator, Inframon was experienced at looking at customer challenges and devising plans to make things work better. Of course, when you recognize that it’s time for your own company to push beyond the comfort zone, it can be overwhelming. The team at Inframon quickly leaned into the Azure CSP program, building upon an already strong Microsoft partnership.

Understanding that their on-premise skills were critical to bridging the cloud and on-premise solutions, Inframon invested in three key areas as they built their Cloud Solutions Provider model: governance, security, and management.

To better address unique customer needs while striving to deliver a fully automated Azure environment, Inframon developed an internal Enable Azure team. “We’ve embraced the Enable Azure world. We’re driving that into our business so that we can be flexible and agile,” said McKenna. The internal Enable Azure team identifies which processes can be automated and which need to be customized.

"We reduce costs. More and more, we talk to customers who just want to focus on their core business and allow us to take operational control over a lot of their infrastructure."

- Sean Roberts, Managing Director and Co-Founder, Inframon

Best-in-class tools

Inframon sought to further refine their tool kit to address a variety of customer situations. They spent several months researching top-rated Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to embed with their Azure CSP offerings.

The result? Inframon established key partnerships with ISVs, providing best-in-class cloud management tools to reduce customers' capital expenditures and better manage operating expenses. “We reduce costs. More and more, we talk to customers who just want to focus on their core business and allow us to take operational control over a lot of their infrastructure," said Sean Roberts, Inframon’s Managing Director and co-founder.

Custom perspective

Inframon’s Hyper Cloud Platform (HCP), a dashboard created by the Enable Azure team, wraps around Azure. HCP, critical to articulating the solution’s effectiveness, hooks into Azure’s APIs and helps Inframon mimic the customer’s organizational structure. It enables them to understand where and how resources are used, and identify opportunities to be more efficient. Customers have comprehensive visibility with HCP and even some autonomy to make changes, set SLAs, and provision within the platform to right-size for their business VMs.

For server migration assessments, Inframon works with ISV partner Cloudamize, which offers a lightweight assessment tool. Layered on top of Azure, the tool provides customers with a detailed performance analysis on compute, storage, and network resources based on observed peak CPU utilization, storage capacity, IOPS, and more. Cloudamize helps Inframon identify the best cloud configuration for optimal performance at the lowest possible cost for the customer.

When a customer has more complex needs, Inframon works with ISV partner Movere. Movere offers a secure platform as a service (PaaS) solution that does not require agent installation in the customer environment. With either partner, Inframon provides a projection analysis with a view of current performance versus performance with a recommended cloud configuration. Assessment results set the stage for Inframon to design and build the Azure blueprint.

Azure Go Live Trial

Based upon the Azure blueprint, customers can immediately implement the solution or opt for Inframon’s “Azure Go Live Trial.” Marketed as a no-risk cloud trial to customers, Azure Go Live is a fully operational solution. Trial versions of ISV partners’ solutions are even embedded to provide a complete experience.

Once it’s time to move, Inframon leverages Carbonite’s DoubleTake Move to migrate server workloads with efficient real-time replication across any distance. It keeps systems in-sync by sending only incremental changes in real time, with no downtime. If bandwidth is an issue, another partner, Velostrata, is chosen for its wide area network (WAN) optimization capabilities.

"Moving to an annuity-based model actually gives the business more balance. It allows us to be able to predict costs over a longer period of time… We've seen our revenue increase tenfold."

- Gordon McKenna, CTO and Co-Founder, Inframon

Right after the migration, customers can leverage the power of the latest Intel processors in Azure, including M-series VMs for heavy Enterprise workloads. M-series VMs are powered by Intel® Xeon® E7-8890 v3 CPUs. The biggest VM in the series—M128s—utilizes four 18-core CPUs, based on Intel Haswell processor technology with Intel® Hyper-Threading, running at 2.50 GHz, 128 vCPUs per VM in total. For customers migrating to Azure, it means a significant increase of compute power comparing to older CPUs that they used on-premise.

Built into the trial, Barracuda, Inframon’s app security partner, provides a firewall to protect the network. In addition, TrendMicro Deep Security protects the platform and the end points of the server layer. Often customers think they need one security tool or the other. For enterprises-grade protection, a best practice is to have both. If you only have one, it’s like locking the windows and leaving the front door open. Inframon’s goal is to deliver trust for the customer by providing the right solutions, locking the windows and the front door.

Can it be that easy?

Once a cloud solution is defined and presented, customers often ask, “How can it be that easy?” or “How can it be that cheap?” Like any professional athlete, Inframon makes complex actions look easy. Automation and experience are the key to cost effective and efficient cloud solutions. Efficiency is built into Inframon's culture. Staff are encouraged to develop better and more efficient ways to accomplish operations tasks with incentives given based on how those efficiencies benefit customers.

Not everyone was convinced that CSP was an opportunity. Inframon had identified Barracuda, a security-focused ISV as a strategic partner. However, Barracuda wasn’t yet operating within a subscription model. Inframon helped Barracuda build it just so they could collaborate with them.

“Once we showed them that moving to an annuity-based model actually gives the business more balance, they got it. It allows us to be able to predict costs over a longer period of time… We've seen our revenue increase tenfold. Inframon have a similar annuity model with Trend, and have also worked on new trial license models with Cloudamize which have allowed us to offer free cloud assessments to customers. Overall, we have found most of the ISVs have been very forthcoming in sharing in our goals of giving the best end-to-end experience for a customer’s journey to the cloud,” shared McKenna.