ABOUT
Industry
Hospitality and Technology
Partners Used
Azure and Virtana
CHALLENGE
Migrating and
optimizing workloads
to the cloud for a global
fast-food restaurant chain
RESULTS
Cloud migrations ahead of
schedule with 12% in annual
cloud cost savings
Many of this company’s restaurant locations are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. With that kind of operating environment, they can’t afford to be down a single minute
The Challenge
A Global Fast-Food Restaurant with Aggressive IT Plans
cloudEQ learned about the challenges a global fastfood restaurant faced in its multi-cloud environment. This company had already moved most of its onpremises workloads in North America to the cloud. Now, they wanted to move all their workloads in Europe, Asia, and Latin America to the cloud. Accomplishing that task one localized region at a time would be tedious and time-consuming, and the CIO of this company wanted to allocate his staff to other key priorities.
“The customer had a mandate to migrate to the cloud and was under a strict timeline. We needed to create a migration strategy that was not only efficient but also provided reliability of their system in order to service their customers around the clock,” said Sean Barker, CEO of cloudEQ.
“Our understanding of both their business goals and customer service commitment guided our migration strategy.”
Moving their workloads to the cloud was only part of the equation. To be successful in the cloud, companies must develop a long-term FinOps strategy to avoid generating unintentional cloud spend that does not produce meaningful results. Many organizations enjoy the greater flexibility and initial lower costs in building and deploying apps after migrating to the cloud. However, it isn’t long before these organizations experience the sticker shock that comes when their cloud spend starts to run away. Such seemed to be the fate of this restaurant company until cloudEQ approached them with a unique proposal.
The Solutions
A Custom Migration Plan with Intelligent Cloud
Cost Recommendations
cloudEQ analyzed the company’s workloads and created a custom migration plan that aligned with each country’s data requirements and regulations. Once they aligned with legal requirements, cloudEQ began methodically moving workloads to the cloud in a way that didn’t disrupt their operations. That outcome resulted from careful planning and identifying the dependencies certain applications had on certain parts of the company’s on-premises infrastructure.
“Unfortunately, some companies do not achieve their business or technical goals when migrating to the cloud,” said Barker.
“Without proper planning and the ability to gain insight into the existing environment, a migration strategy will always fall short. Migrating existing applications requires careful analysis and methodical orchestration.”
Virtana’s solutions provided cloudEQ with the insights they needed to plan smart, successful migrations that offered little to no disruption to their applications. “This was an exciting time for the customer and for us,” said Barker. “We managed to migrate all their environments ahead of schedule and with minimal impact on their day-to-day activities.”
Once the company was in the cloud, cloudEQ then set to work on ensuring they adopted a FinOps strategy that ensured they had the high performance they needed without the runaway costs. Before making any changes to their applications, cloudEQ used Virtana’s Cloud Cost Management platform to assess their cloud spend. “Immediately, Virtana CCM identified over $750k in savings,” Barker recalled.
“After seeing the results, cloudEQ and the client worked together to create an ongoing FinOps solution to contain future costs while supporting growth, application performance, and customer experience. Having these policies in place ensures sustained value for the client and their customers.”
The Results
A Timely Migration and Sound FinOps Strategy
That initial $750k savings grew to over $100k of monthly savings as cloudEQ worked with this company to optimize their cloud applications in a way that accelerated their business activities. Since then, the restaurant has saved over $3.5M in cloud costs while realizing double-digit annual growth globally.
Sean remarked, “We evaluated Virtana’s solutions thoroughly against other providers and found them to be a valuable partner. Their platform provided the cloudEQ team with a launch point to create longterm, customizable solutions for our customers. We will continue to build on this foundation and partnership for success in future projects.”
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