Centrica is the UK’s largest gas and electricity company. A legacy technology stack and fixed data center infrastructure limited its ability to innovate and impeded visibility into its infrastructure and operations costs. In addition to having a flexible IT infrastructure, it wanted to digitise and automate its operations to minimise the amount of manual processes and lower costs per trade.

Thanks in part to the help of Avanade Advisory, Centrica’s trading IT had been shifting toward the cloud for years. Now it was time to go all in on the Microsoft Azure platform, utilising the accompanying DevOps tooling. As a trusted partner for more than a decade with knowledge of the company’s applications and extensive expertise on the Azure platform, Avanade was the logical choice.

We helped Centrica Trading with the complex journey of moving its application estate from its legacy data center onto the Azure cloud. Using an agile methodology, the project team migrated multiple applications onto Azure piece by piece to ensure there were no outages. Also, given that Centrica Trading is the most regulated entity within the Centrica group, we created technical designs for every application that were thoroughly tested and signed off by Centrica’s information security team.

Centrica Trading quickly began seeing results that mapped to its key goals:

• Reduced operating costs by 60 to 70% for one app
• Increased transparency now that infrastructure costs for all development and production environments are available daily instead of monthly, enabling developers to optimise infrastructure
• Greater stability and trade performance with tools that improve the overall workplace experience and accelerate the time it takes to launch new products

Technologies used: SQL on Azure, Linux servers on Azure

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