Hybrid cloud cost savings for membership firm

The Client

Our client is a non-profit legal membership organisation founded in the mid 1800’s. They’re recognised by businesses, government and the public as the leader of the legal profession in Victoria. With thousands of members on their books, the organisation represents a potent force of opinion and expertise. The firm shapes the nature and reputation of the legal profession, and influences reforms to the justice system.

Adopting the cloud and soaring prices

Several years ago, the client took a cloud first approach and migrated the majority of their infrastructure to the Public Cloud. Management’s perception was that cloud adoption will be inexpensive and reduce costs.

At the same time, they went down the SaaS route for some of their key applications—Office 365 was the chosen tool for productivity and collaboration and Citrix was utilised for remote access and disaster recovery enablement.

The solution was working well and satisfying the business’ technology needs, but the public cloud cost kept creeping up every month. Being a non-for-profit organisation, it was getting difficult for management to justify the rising operational cost of IT without any added additional benefit.

Empyrean delivers cost savings with hybrid cloud

Empyrean’s cloud consultants collaborated with the client to understand their frustrations with the cloud solution. To deliver a fit-for-purpose solution, we undertook the following activities:

An options analysis of the solutions in the market.
Recommendation as to what technology was best fit for the client.
Proposed ways to decrease the costs of the public cloud environment.
Completed an in-depth ROI analysis to ensure that the numbers stacked up over the next 3 years and that the savings were significant.
Designed a solution architecture of the end state solution.
Implemented the solution with the client.

Benefits of the hybrid cloud solution

The solution fits the business financial needs.
Achieves significant reduction (approximately 70%) in Data Centre monthly operational expenditure.
Reduced complexity & improved agility.
An overall technical architecture that’s easily manageable by a small IT team.
Established an agile and dynamic ICT environment that is fit for purpose, and can flexibly scale with the business

Repatriation from all cloud to hybrid cloud

Empyrean brought back key infrastructure components that do not benefit from the Public Cloud model to on-premises. Instead, public cloud is used as disaster recovery and back up target.

Highly available and robust working environment.

A state-of-the-art automated disaster recovery solution is achieved using Zerto, which meets clients RPO and RTO. We are using the Public Cloud for backup and archival to meet the client’s 7-year data retention compliance obligations.

Improved end user experience with enhanced collaboration and flexibility.

Office 365 and Citrix Virtual desktop are delivering the flexible and collaborative environment. Enabling our client to provide their staff an efficient, easy to use and feature rich remote working solution.

The end user experience was enhanced with an on-premises All-Flash Dell vSan solution.