Construction giant migrates cloud back to South Africa for flexibility to run, manage and scale without latency or access concerns
A major listed player in the South African and Sub-Saharan African construction market, Stefanutti Stocks employs 7,500 people and earns billions in annual revenue with projects running from Cape Town to Dubai. It has been able to transform the face of their IT department as an early adopter of the cloud and has managed to face work from home disruptions without major losses with the migration of their VMware cloud environment from Europe to South Africa.
Its sheer scale and the geographically dispersed needs of its on-site teams have been the catalyst for transforming its IT team's role to that of service provider.
"Our IT group acts like a service provider, or a reseller, providing different services for around 16 companies and 200 to 300 projects at any given point. So, we have to be agile and efficient and ensure access to systems no matter where the construction crew lands,” said Kevin Wilson, general manager, Group IT Services.
In 2015, a long-time user of VMware, Stefanutti migrated to a vCloud Air solution. The move let it port legacy applications without significant expense and conduct a virtual lift-and-shift migration into the cloud to deploy more modern cloud services and enable other technology services. But, latency issues required Stefanutti’s investment in network acceleration equipment and the establishment of its own interconnect sites.
“We wanted a partner that could emulate what we had (in the cloud), take ownership of our cloud architecture and get on with it. I don't want to build my own cloud architecture, nor do I want to know how providers will keep my environment up and running. I want it to work. As a long-term user of VMware, both on-premises and in the cloud, I know that it is the best solution for this approach because, ultimately, your application doesn't know where it is. It's highly available, properly backed up, and lives in the cloud," said Wilson.
The complete and certified VMware stack at Routed delivered a more reliable and predictable migration. In addition, Routed's full-stack VMware Cloud Director embodies features Stefanutti needed for its IT-as-a-Service approach.
