Nifast Reduces 30 % Of Infrastructure Costs by Migration to Microsoft Azure

Over the years, Nifast has recognized the need to increase its value in the supply chain and transformed its footprint into a global supply chain solution provider with strategically placed global facilities to optimize not only competitive quality sourcing but also comprehensive JIT delivery services from facilities located nearby some major customers.

Company

  • Size: 51-200 employees
  • Location: US & India

Industry

  • Transportation/Distribution

Practice Areas

Challenge

Nifast India Infrastructure was hosted completely on-premise, so remote work was not possible and security was a major concern. Frustrated at the expense of on-premises data centers, they wanted an environment aligned with advances in computing technology.

There was a huge dependency on on-premises hardware, due to which hardware failures had caused business impact. In the past Nifast had faced multiple downtimes which had impacted its ERP users. The company wanted to improve business continuity, Even the two-tier architecture caused lots of slowness and performance issues for their daily usage. Nifast India needed the resilience, adaptability, and efficiency of the cloud.

Nifast India Team hosted their Microsoft Dynamics Navision workloads on-premises which is their core application without extended IT support as they didn’t have a dedicated IT team to take care of the infrastructure. The team felt burdened by the expenses, cumbersome procedures, and performance gaps between the legacy infrastructure and current technology. They were not work from home ready and faced issues during the initial phase of the COVID – 19 pandemics.

Solution

Cloud 9 recommended a complete digital transformation solution by moving Nifast’s ERP solution to Azure Cloud so they can experience new capabilities that seamlessly connect people, assets, workflow, and business processes, empowering organizations to be more resilient.

Cloud 9 helped Nifast India to rehost their entire Windows and SQL server Infrastructure (including Microsoft Dynamics Navision). Azure offers compute options designed and approved for use with Dynamics Navision ERP. Cloud 9 designed 3-tier architecture for Nifast India based on the best practices set by Microsoft for Dynamics ERP. Cloud 9 has implemented RDWeb technology for the Nifast ERP users to securely access the environment via the SSL encrypted route.

Cloud 9 migrated 100+ GB of data and made sure that the transition was smooth. Azure Backup takes snapshots of the data according to a backup schedule. In addition, SQL Server Agent automates and schedules backups. The automated SQL Server backups help systems recover faster.

Results

Nifast Team found that it can add headroom and capacity at less cost than before—about a 30 percent reduction in infrastructure costs for the migrated systems. Now when the Nifast team finds that CPU or memory use is spiking, increasing capacity is a change management process, rather than a drawn-out procurement. It takes less time and far fewer people.

The migration to Cloud helped Nifast India reduce its need to manage software and underlying infrastructure while accelerating time to value for supply chain applications. Migration to the Azure cloud platform also makes it possible to adjust the system’s processing power when software updates and integration projects are undertaken.

With Cloud 9 Managed Services, Nifast India doesn’t need to worry about monitoring, maintenance, patching of the Azure servers. Cloud 9 regularly performs infrastructure audits as part of its managed services offering and cost optimization practices.

Nifast India no longer needs to invest in infrastructure but can concentrate on the core business, and processes. The company benefits from geo-redundant data storage and all security compliance Azure brings to the table. Cloud 9 and Azure together have improved the company’s cybersecurity stance by helping to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of the data.