As one of the UK’s largest housing providers with over 50,000 properties, a social mission for Home Group is to provide good quality homes to those who can’t afford rentals. There’s a lot of data that goes into delivering on this promise and that data needs to be easily accessible so employees can focus on their mission.

The existing data centre reached its end of life and was slow to operate. Rather than employees spending time working on a system upgrade, management wanted to ensure their teams were available to work on things that make a real difference to customers. They faced a decision: invest in an expensive infrastructure upgrade or move to the cloud. Home Group partnered with Avanade to help find a defined, reliable path to the cloud that would release the costs of operating a large data centre and open new opportunities for future innovations.

After analszing Home Group’s existing environment, we helped design and build the target landing zone for the organisation’s data and workloads. We then built a hybrid cloud solution for a quick and complete lift and shift to a Microsoft Azure platform that also offers private cloud hosting. This flexible mix ensures any incompatible workloads are supported. With legacy data centres fully retired, Avanade Managed Services will allow Home Group to realise continuous value from its cloud operations by capitalising on new technologies. The end-to-end approach simplified the process and removed any friction in the journey to the cloud. It also enabled more access and control at lower costs by delivering the solution through Avanade’s nearshore Advanced Technology Centre.

These solutions are providing numerous benefits to Home Group and its customers such as:

• Helping to keep customers’ data safe
• Providing a steady cost profile
• Strengthening Home Group’s business continuity plan
• Improving scalability and resilience

Find out more about how we can help you exploit the ever-expanding power of Azure cloud services.