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Customer Profile
Stout
Industry: Financial Services
Headquarters: Royal Oak, Michigan
Size: 500-750 Employees | Global Offices 20 | 80+ Countries
ServedStout is a leading independent advisory firm specializing in Investment Banking, Valuation Advisory, Dispute Consulting, Management Consulting, and Transaction Opinions. Stout serves a range of clients, from Fortune 100 corporations to privately held companies in numerous industries worldwide. Stout’s clients and their advisors rely on Stout’s premier expertise, deep industry knowledge, and unparalleled responsiveness on complex financial matters.
Business & Technology Challenge
Stout needed to improve their IT agility to meet ongoing business needs. With Coretek's help, they identified the need to migrate a portion of their data center to Microsoft Azure
Phase 1
Stout CIO Stacy Carron and her team, along with Coretek, identified use cases perfect for Azure:
Abrupt closing of infrastructure-heavy client projects
Requirement of dedicated SQL database and fast turnaround for new projects
Firewall needed to support VPN
Centralized file storage solution
Web application firewall need
Need for a new website platform
Data sharing and need to access applications from remote offices
Phase 1 Benefits
Excellent response time running massive applications in Azure
Ability to scale up or scale down easily
Focus on critical issues, not resource planning to support growth
Phase 2
This phase centered on consolidating and optimizing the remaining infrastructure, in which they evaluated three scenarios.
A complete move to a hosted data center
A complete move to Azure
A blend of the two options in which Stout analyzed projected costs and determined the initial spend was similar. However, Azure had the potential for future savings with the elasticity of the platform and built-in automation opportunities.
Phase 2 Benefits
Agility to accelerate Stout’s office move plan and move within six weeks of request with little business interruption
Monetize support and pass IT cost on to business units and clients by using Coretek Azure Management Suite (AMS)
Deploy workloads in record timeframes
Monitor and optimize Azure costs resulting in half the spend of expected budgetary estimates
Results
Ultimately, Azure was the best solution for Stout. Several business drivers supported their move to Azure.
Relocation from the building that housed their data center
Failover and disaster recovery options were costly and dependent on one region
The number of remote offices continues to grow
Strategic desire remove the physical IT office a hub for all IT
Stout partnered with Coretek for strategic planning and preparation for the migration. Coretek diligently worked as a trusted partner to Stout through the process and published and executed a migration plan over four months.
The Azure platform enables IT to expand and contract resources on-demand. This elasticity simplifies management and reduces costs as customers only pay for what they use. Coretek's Managed Services includes the Coretek Azure Management Suite (AMS) benefits, which allows IT to allocate and manage users and groups consumption 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, Coretek provides the consulting expertise to move to Azure quickly, securely, and cost-effectively, and the Managed Services to ensure you continue to use Azure securely and optimally.
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