Nifast Corporation Benefits From World-Class Security and Auto Scalability to Meet Customer Workloads

Nifast’s Information Technology (IT) platform was based upon Microsoft software, running on server hardware in an on-premises data center they managed. The solution leveraged legacy versions of Microsoft Dynamics Navision, SQL Server, Microsoft Office and Citrix XenApp. All offices were connected via an MPLS network and the servers were replicated to a co-location facility for redundancy.

This legacy solution provided a stable platform and a long life, but Nifast began facing several issues as the software and hardware aged. The Navision solution had been highly customized to support their business, and as a result, became very time consuming and costly to upgrade. Even operating system updates became difficult to deploy as they sometimes interfered with Navision functionality. As time went by, the software became several versions old, making updates more and more difficult and eventually the software became unsupported by Microsoft. The risk of security breaches and component failures increased.

Nifast wished to leverage the capabilities of the latest Microsoft software (Navision, SQL Server, and Office) to provide a more reliable platform and more effectively manage their IT environment. They also wanted to remove the operational burden of maintaining a physical infrastructure.