Its rapidly-growing and international high-tech business had rendered global access to the Bomatec IT systems essential. The newly established sales offices in China and Canada, as well as the integration of a factory acquired in Malaysia, needed to be quickly and cost-effectively incorporated into the central IT systems.
 
A power outage, which had led to the complete failure of the in-house data center, demonstrated the true advantages of the cloud in terms of data security and availability. Additionally, it was becoming clear that the sharp spike in international access was causing connectivity and performance issues at the Bomatec data center, which would prove untenable over the longer term.

In close cooperation with Markos Pliakas, Head of ICT Infrastructure, we created a cloud infrastructure centered around Microsoft Azure. In this way, all participating companies can now access the central business applications without any problems at all.

All of the important business applications, including ERP (abas), DMS (ArcFlow) and CAQ (QM), were migrated outwards to Azure. For cost and performance reasons, global redundancy was dispensed with and the servers operated in an Azure region.  Azure Backup would ensure that the loss risk of business-critical data was also minimized.
 
Eight existing servers were migrated to Azure. In addition, eleven more were rolled out, which was done practically at the click of a mouse using the ready-made Azure templates. The applications are accessed via Azure RDS servers and an encrypted gateway. With the global availability of the Azure Cloud, the various regions, including China, Canada and Malaysia, were able to access the central services both optimally and securely.
 
Today, the company's own data center is still being used at headquarters in Höri, but mainly for telephony with Skype for Business and also for file services.

Following training, the automated deployment and management of Azure business applications has freed up a lot of time for Markos Pliakas. He can now focus in detail on new projects and IT development, instead of losing time on operational tasks and server management.
 
By standardizing clients with RDS services on Azure business applications, fewer user problems are also arising today. A significant reduction in support effort has been the result here. 
 
With the prior introduction of Office 365, staff particularly appreciated the changeover of e-mail archiving from PST files to online archiving with Exchange Online. They are now able to conveniently access the e-mail archive from any location and at any time, as and when required.
 
OneDrive for Business has also replaced the traditional home directory on file servers in the most elegant of ways. At any time, our staff can now access their own data in various ways, work together in global teams much easier and efficiently, as well as exchange data both securely and swiftly.

With the migration of its business applications to the Azure Cloud, Bomatec has in many cases broken new ground. Markos Pliakas has had to acquire a lot of know-how on his own. With the support of our Azure professionals, however, we were able to overcome all these hurdles.