Laying the foundation for simpler Azure migration

At SoftwareOne, we understand that establishing a solid foundation for complex and major cloud migration is key to its success. From understanding mission critical workloads, to essential apps embedded into organisational culture and processes – migrating and modernising is essential, but it can also feel intimidating and disruptive.

By working alongside our customers to tailor an individual Azure landing zone, we provide a stable and effective jumping off point for major change and migration into the Azure environment. With unparalleled flexibility and scalability, this baseline for applications, workloads, security, network and identity ensures increased adoption and ongoing Azure relationships.

In this project showcase, we look at how SoftwareOne helped La Trobe Financial migrate and modernise with their very own Azure landing zone.

Modernising La Trobe Financial’s workloads with Azure landing zone

Operating since 1952, La Trobe Financial is one of Australia’s leading diversified Credit Asset Managers and credit specialists, with $16 billion in assets under management.

An existing SoftwareOne licensing customer, La Trobe Financial was seeking an effective way to migrate and modernise their legacy services, apps and critical workloads.

La Trobe Financial asked SoftwareOne to assist in developing a bespoke Azure landing zone to ensure a repeatable, scalable and modular workload implementation that could help their Azure environment grow. This project had a TCV of $100k and was AMMP funded.

Getting ready to make the switch

Building on their existing licensing partnership, SoftwareOne and La Trobe Financial worked together to develop a robust plan to migrate critical workloads and core services to Azure.

Assisting with early phase code management and both platform and application landing zones, SoftwareOne supported La Trobe financial with security access and detailed tagging, ensuring a smoother transition of content, apps and workloads further down the track.

In starting from this strong baseline position, La Trobe financial now have the flexibility to modernise their workplace and migrate other key infrastructure as they see fit.

Laying the foundation for flexible future workloads

Establishing a new normal for a complex cloud migration is no easy task. It requires extensive planning and an ability to understand how it will impact trusted processes and legacy services.

To do this successfully, SoftwareOne offered a tailor-made implementation plan for La Trobe Financial that would meet their exact modern work and migration goals.

This included:

• Microsoft Azure Landing Zone– Giving them the foundation to move many workloads to the cloud in the future.
• Exchange migration to cloud – All of La Trobe Financials’ email system was modernised to Exchange online
• Increase licence uptake – La Trobe expanded their integration with Microsoft products, adding new licences for Exchange online and Microsoft 365.
• Cost optimisation – Best practice approach and effective rightsizing allows La Trobe to efficiently plan for and execute essential cost management strategies for workloads, performance and infrastructure.

Flexible cloud that scales as needed

Thanks to the partnership between SoftwareOne and La Trobe Financial, can now enjoy the following benefits from their Azure environment:

• An easier way to deploy and manage workloads in Azure, minimising the intricacy and expenses of managing cloud infrastructure.
• Simplified deployment and management of workloads in Azure has increased cloud adoption, leading to more use and expansion of Azure services and other Microsoft licensing.
• With a well established landing zone in place, La Trobe financial can now easily account for security governance, flexible and ongoing modernisation, and innovation at an enterprise scale.

Keeping an eye on the future

This is step one of a long cloud journey between SoftwareOne and La Trobe Financial to modernise their workloads, review apps, and customise within the Azure landing zone environment. Cost optimisation will continue to be monitored to ensure any development in the landing zone remains efficient.

Now that La Trobe Financial has has an enterprise ready Azure landing zone, it needs to be kept clean and conform to the baseline that was set at the beginning of the process.

As SoftwareOne and La Trobe Financial continue to work together in the future, it’s vital that both existing and new workloads are consistently reviewed, providing a stable and simple launching pad as La Trobe looks to migrate and modernise further with Azure.

Your partner in Azure migration

We’re ready to ease the cloud transition and help you customers migrate and modernise.

By establishing strong foundations through a built for purpose Azure landing zone and providing ongoing support, we’ll help get your customers through the door and ensure they stick around.

If your customers are facing similar challenges, SoftwareOne can help them discover their migration needs and hit the ground running. With industry leading expertise in Azure implementation and support, we’re better placed than anybody to deliver unbeatable cost management, optimised cloud setup, and streamlined licensing.