Background
Hymns Ancient & Modern is a publisher of religious publications, with more than 150 years since its first publication and sales of nearly 200 million copies.
The organisation needed to migrate their large server infrastructure to the cloud to keep pace with technology and ensure that performance and uptime was optimal to ensure the publication of texts met with strict deadlines.
Project Description
With multiple sites and remote workers, Hymns Ancient & Modern needed to ensure that core systems and data were centrally accessible. The existing infrastructure consisted of several physical servers spread across the multiple sites using site-to-site VPNs to enable remote access.
Whilst Impreza IT implemented strong redundancy measures, having on-premise systems created a significant risk of downtime due to disaster scenarios such as hardware failure or site loss. To address this, Impreza IT migrated servers to the cloud using Microsoft Azure.
In addition to offering excellent uptime, the Azure infrastructure was geographically replicated allowing for almost instantaneous failover with Azure Site Recovery in the event a primary data centre went offline.
Furthermore, as Azure is a consumption-based platform it allowed the organisation to increase/decrease compute resource to account for fluctuations in workloads due to seasonality and other factors. All servers utilised virtual resource meaning there was no degradation of hardware, and the solution offered optimal performance and speeds.
The solution ultimately allowed the customer to ensure uptime, no longer relying on office-based servers, as well as improve performance and change the cost model from costly capital expenditure of 3-5 year hardware refresh cycles, to operational expenditure dictated by usage.
Project Benefits
- Near-instant scalability allowing increased resources to cope with busy periods
- Greatly improved uptime by using geo-replication to ensure high availability of Azure services
- Improved performance by using virtual resource immune to hardware degradation
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