Foundation IT offers comprehensive managed infrastructure services across industries
Foundation IT helps clients plan, implement, and manage IT infrastructure. The company has a Gold Cloud Platform Competency for Microsoft Azure and works across all sectors, drawing on experience to identify the right use cases for cloud services on Azure. A Microsoft partner for more than 15 years, Foundation IT has a history of helping customers maximize the potential of Microsoft products including Azure, Office 365, and SharePoint.
With locations throughout the United Kingdom, retailer Russell & Bromley hosted its key production services at its head office in Bromley, England, but its server, storage, and networking hardware were aging. Russell & Bromley was also embarking on a digital transformation project that would see changes to its point-of-sale systems, enterprise resource planning, and more, requiring a resilient and flexible platform to run on. Russell & Bromley contacted Foundation IT.
Azure delivers the flexibility to scale with business demands
Given Russell & Bromley’s existing investment in Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365, Foundation IT recommended a fully managed Azure solution. Foundation IT worked with the Russell & Bromley team to evaluate the existing estate, devise a migration plan, and execute the move to ensure the optimization of all migrated services. Additionally, Foundation IT configured Russell & Bromley’s environment for best practices to ensure optimal levels of security, resiliency, and access control.
Foundation IT used Azure Site Recovery to migrate Russell & Bromley’s virtual machines to Azure, enabling production services to be switched to Azure without affecting Russell & Bromley’s business. Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Storage were set up with geo-redundant storage to ensure availability, and Foundation IT deployed Azure ExpressRoute for overall quality of service. Finally, Azure Backup was employed to protect data in the cloud as well as on-premises services, giving Russell & Bromley a truly hybrid solution.
“Using Azure, we have been able to create a more reliable infrastructure platform for Russell & Bromley and remove the reliance that stores previously had on infrastructure at the head office, which would regularly create disruption with their day to day trading,” said Mike Starnes, Head of Client Services, Foundation IT.
Combined with the ongoing support Foundation IT offers as a managed service provider, migrating key production services to Azure has freed Russell & Bromley's IT resources of tasks that detract from delivering on the company's digital transformation goals.