For more than 90 years, Protective Insurance has responded to its clients with speed, efficiency, and deep expertise in the field. Specializing in large-scale transportation, its clients include some of the largest fleets in the trucking and package delivery industry, which operate with zero margin for error. For a company known for the reliability of its underwriting and claims processes, migrating to Microsoft Azure and embracing Azure Synapse Analytics meant enhancing existing strengths and discovering new opportunities to leverage its data.


DRIVING TRANSPORTATION & TRANSFORMATION:

Delivery drivers today have access to a vastly expanded set of tools and resources than they had decades ago in the CB radio era. This workforce is empowered by mobile platforms and expects instantaneous access to data. Protective Insurance recognized that to keep up, it needed an adaptable, future-proof data solution.

The challenge, as the company saw it, was to migrate data from the very legacy systems upon which it had built its reputation into a cloud platform that responded to the evolving expectations of its clients. Simply storing data wasn’t enough—the company recognized that it needed a better way to generate actionable insights, which in the past had been a laborious process. “Data is the second most important asset after our people,” said Bahr Omidfar, Chief Information Officer at Protective Insurance.


MIGRATING TO AZURE:

Time is of the essence when it comes to underwriting and claims, so Protective Insurance understandably wasn’t keen on a long, multiphase cloud migration process. What the company got with Azure was a comprehensive plan, Data Platform in 30 Days (DPi30), that included end-to-end platform deployment, enabling more timely and accurate underwriting, which in turn led to increased profitability.

Guided by dedicated Azure specialists during onsite sessions, the company initially chose to migrate just a portion of its claims data. This allowed Protective Insurance to take a small step before a giant leap and reassured the organization about the security of its data. When this test proved successful, it proceeded to transform its entire data platform.

Securely sharing data is crucial to success in the insurance industry. For Protective Insurance, this means keeping customer information safe while communicating with multiple external organizations.

It was also important to Protective Insurance to make smarter decisions by running models on its own unstructured data. Much of the unstructured data that agents gather in the field consists of still images and videos of accident scenes. When Protective Insurance started moving this data into Microsoft Azure Data Lake, the company discovered that Azure Synapse Analytics let it seamlessly incorporate data into its analytics strategy. “We had a lot of pictures of accidents, and we didn't know what to do with them. Now, we're able to actually run analytics on them in Data Lake. We started to really leverage our unstructured data,” said Omidfar.


DATA ON THE MOVE- TELEMETRY & TRANSPORTATION:

One crucial source of data comes telemetrically from the trucks themselves. When a customer watches the little icon of a delivery driver on their phone, they’re seeing a vast amount of information generated in real time. Storing, accessing, and acting on that data has traditionally been a heavy lift. Azure Synapse provided Protective Insurance the means to not only store telemetry data, but to better act on it.

As Omidfar puts it, “We get a lot of telematics data from the trucks that we insure, and it was just way too expensive to store it. And the compute requirements were also too expensive. Having a place where we can store it and run analytics on it that is cost-effective was really important to us.”

One way the company leveraged its telemetry data was to use Microsoft Power BI, a powerful business analytics service that allows users to generate visualizations and dashboards. Previously unwieldy data sets were now elegantly displayed, making the process of reviewing claims faster and more efficient.


USING DATA TO PREVENT ACCIDENTS BEFORE THEY HAPPEN:

Growth requires innovation. Azure Synapse gives Protective Insurance the ability to use machine learning to make correlations in data that wouldn’t have been possible before. In one instance, the company was able to dive deep into the data to identify a particularly dangerous intersection.

“We were looking at a graphical map of the most instances of head and neck injuries,” said Omidfar. “It was easier for us to actually identify the customers that drive through that intersection quite a bit and tell them to avoid it (during) certain times of day.

With Azure, we can actually help our customers drive more safely and keep the roads safer for the rest of us,” adds Omnidfar. “It’s really powerful how simple things can literally save people’s lives.”


DRIVING SAVINGS & NEW REVENUE WITH AZURE

Staying current, future-proofing infrastructure, and creating new opportunities for innovation are all part of the Protective Insurance story. What about reducing costs and driving new revenue?

Migrating the company’s infrastructure and data workloads to Azure is helping reduce capital expenditures and allowing the company to repurpose its existing datacenter for revenue-generating initiatives. The long-trusted company is now poised to grow with Azure Synapse Analytics. According to Omidfar, “Our plan now is in the next 50 weeks to move all of our data onto Azure, build our enterprise data warehouse using Azure Synapse, and build all of our data hubs and data stores on Azure.”

In today’s transportation industry, drivers deliver more than goods—they deliver data. Powered by Azure Synapse, Protective Insurance looks ahead and drives digital transformation.

The client is a prominent law firm in south East USA. They were running their offices, servers & network infrastructure on a hosted center which was extended to Microsoft Azure. They wanted to maintain certain workloads in their hosted data center but wanted high availability of these workloads. These workloads included compute, storage, networking web app and Azure Backup.

SNP performed a cloud assessment of the client’s existing infrastructure and prepared a detailed roadmap for deploying a hybrid cloud strategy to achieve stable, secure and high-performance workloads running on Azure IaaS. SNP constantly monitored and managed the Azure workloads.

To get the client production-ready, SNP leveraged multiple technologies like Azure Monitor, Azure Log Analytics, Azure Application Insights, Service Map, Tool, and Log Analytics Workspace.

The client has experienced enhanced scalability, business continuity, and enhanced security of its IT service delivery. The client reconfigured their Azure Site Recovery and implemented the best practices. Some of the most significant improvements experienced by the client are:

• The client achieved higher levels of continuity, scalability, and security after implementing a Hybrid Cloud.

• The client gained confidence about their disaster recovery implementation with SNP’s DR drills which were performed without any impact on the primary production application.

• SNP’s 24/7 managed support service is an assurance to the customer that their applications will be available and complaint.

The client is a global organization which specializes in inventory management applications, which is hosted on Azure and is used by MNC’s. They have huge databases that store mission critical data of the customers using their applications. The client was very concerned with aspects around security on Azure, so the challenge was to secure the resources, applications and databases at every possible level and make sure the that does not hinder the flexibility of using and accessing the resources hosted on Azure.

SNP’s team of security experts worked closely with the client team and leveraged the native security applications and few marketplace appliances on Azure. We were able to deliver exactly what the client expected by enabling security center. The client could get a complete and clear picture of the security state of the resources on Azure, SNP helped them define the policies specific to their requirement. As the next step, SNP worked with the client in making them understand the importance of the recommendations and helped the remediate them, thereby achieving the highest secure score as possible, the secure score reflects the security state of the resources on Azure. To get the client production ready SNP leveraged technologies like Azure Sentinel, Log Analytics, Azure Monitor and Azure Security Center. Some of the benefits the customer experienced were:

• Prioritized alerts and incidents – with security center, the customer got access to advanced analytics and global threat intelligence to detect incoming attacks and post-breach activity. Alerts automatically prioritized and grouped into incidents, helping them address the most critical threats first, and giving them the flexibility to create custom security alert groupings.

• We helped the customer reduce network attacks with controlled access to management ports on Azure VMs. This drastically reduces exposure to brute force and other network attacks.

• Adaptive application controls were leveraged to block malware and other unwanted applications by applying whitelisting recommendations adapted to specific Azure workloads.

• Security Policy Settings were leveraged for applications that used regulated data, such as personally identifiable information. These helped the customer easily identify potential vulnerabilities and mitigate threats.

• Email notifications determined security contacts, and email notification settings.

The client is focused on residential and commercial real estate transactions, wills and probate and small business matters.

Looking to grow the business with a substantial increase the customer base, the client was constantly pulled back by CLOUDSMART. CLOUDSMART provides data center colocation and hosting services for websites, email, databases, online backup/replication and other key applications. However, the client suffered frequent websites outages that lead their customers to face inconvenience. To cut back their operational costs, improve the customer experience and get a reliable backup and disaster recovery setup, the client approached SNP technologies.

We partnered with them and the client validated that they could run their website on Azure Web App for Container Service. We helped the client migrate their website from VM on CLOUDSMART to Azure Web App for Container Service with Azure DevOps for Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD).

Post migration the client has experienced significant improvement in the speed and efficiency of their IT service delivery. The company scaled up the website performance depending on the number of users per session with Azure DevOps for Automated Build Process.

The most significant impact experienced by the client are:

• The client’s infrastructure management time has reduced by 80% with managed support from SNP.

•The client has drastically reduced the cost of maintaining their infrastructure now that they don’t need to Maintain Virtual Machine, Patching of VM, Security.

In the next two years, the client is looking to fully support and move all their hosting websites to Azure.

This client is a leading law firm focussing on bankruptcy, workouts, creditors’ rights, employment law, immigration, commercial real estate, employee benefits, banking law, privacy and information security, venture capital, public utilities etc.

The client was running their offices, servers & network infrastructure on a hosted center which was extended on Microsoft Azure. Their existing hosted datacenter was running on VMWare as a base. The client approached SNP to reconfigure their Azure Site Recovery infrastructure as per the best practices.

We partnered with them to perform a cloud assessment of the client’s existing infrastructure and prepared a detailed roadmap for deploying a hybrid cloud strategy to achieve stable, secure and high-performance workloads running on Azure IaaS.

By leveraging technologies like Hybrid Networking, Hybrid Identity, Azure IaaS, VMWare, and Azure Site Recovery, the client has experienced enhanced scalability, business continuity, and enhanced security of its IT service delivery. The client reconfigured their Azure Site Recovery and implemented the best practices.

The client is a New York based, vertically integrated real estate operating and development company with expertise in a wide array of value creation activities, including distressed investments, uncovering value in complex transactions, structured finance investments and real estate development.

The client has a Hyper-V infrastructure and was looking for a disaster recovery and cloud failover. SNP worked closely with the client for a cloud assessment where it was discovered that the client has noted several servers running on legacy operating systems and other with operating systems that are nearing the end of life. The total legacy operating system percentage is 28%, which is a significant percentage to be unprotected.

SNP Technologies performed a cloud assessment for their existing infrastructure and prepared a detailed cloud migration roadmap with a Hybrid Cloud strategy for enhanced stability, security and high performance of the workloads running on Azure IaaS.

SNP leveraged Azure Governance to achieve control over Azure subscriptions, cost management, secured access management of Azure resources and to meet overall policies of the organization. Tools like Azure security center, log analytics, application gateways, network watcher and DDoS protection were leveraged via Azure unified security. As desired by the client Hybrid connectivity was achieved by establishing connectivity between Azure Virtual Network and private cloud.

The client is a leading real estate provider.

The client has a Hyper-V infrastructure and was looking for a disaster recovery and cloud failover. SNP worked closely with the client for a cloud assessment where it was discovered that the client has noted several server running on legacy operating systems and other with operating systems that are nearing the end of life. The total legacy operating system percentage is 28%, which is a significant percentage to be unprotected.

SNP Technologies performed a cloud assessment for their existing infrastructure and prepared a detailed cloud migration roadmap with a Hybrid Cloud strategy for enhanced stability, security and high performance of the workloads running on Azure IaaS. SNP leveraged Azure Governance to achieve control over Azure subscriptions, cost management, secured access management of Azure resources and to meet overall policies of the organization. Tools like Azure security center, log analytics, application gateways, network watcher and DDoS protection were leveraged via Azure unified security. As desired by the client Hybrid connectivity was achieved by establishing connectivity between Azure Virtual Network and private cloud.

The client is an American non-profit technology organization which has been responsible for the production of several children’s educational programs.

As the client has a global presence, they were facing issues with collaboration with the creators. The on-premise datacenter was proving to be expensive for the client in terms of maintenance and lack of disaster recovery plan. Their data was scattered all around the world. To overcome the data woes, the client decided to migrate to Azure cloud Services and implement disaster recovery solution.

SNP worked closely with the client to perform cloud assessment of their existing on-premise infrastructure and prepared a detailed migration roadmap to move their on-premise datacenter to Azure. A Hybrid Cloud strategy was implemented for stable and high-performance workloads running on Azure IaaS with connectivity and DMZ. Test for DR failover was done with Azure Site Recovery.

After migrating to Azure, the client saw a significant improvement in their performance. One hand they managed to bring down the cost and on the other hand they streamlined their IT services across the countries and regions.

From performance management and experience design to open-source development and hosting technology, this client’s digital conversion experts help medium to large organizations move the needle with e-commerce solutions.

A global organization with three distinct business units, the company was positioned for growth — but Amazon Web Services (AWS) was holding them back. Platform inefficiencies were making it difficult to satisfy customer needs and they were forced to hire more and more people to keep things up and running. To cut back operational costs, the client needed a multi-cloud strategy that could scale with their business.

We partnered with them to help migrate clusters from OpenShift on AWS to Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). This significantly improved the speed and efficiency of their IT services. By automating repetitive management processes and streamlining storage, they could now accommodate rapid global growth in both customers and data. With our managed support, this client reduced infrastructure management time by 80% and cut infrastructure maintenance costs.

We’re proud to share that in the next two years, this company hopes to fully support their AKS environment with a proprietary product.

The client is a leading technology company that serves medium to large organizations with performance management, experience design, open source development, and hosting technology.

They were exclusively on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the past few years, but with their global expansion plans, it needed a multi-cloud strategy that could better meet its business needs. While on AWS Cloud, the company experienced several business challenges, including no high availability for customers in many regions. Not only did this make difficult for the client to meet customers’ increasing demands, they were also forced to hire additional labor resources to ensure everything was up and running. The result was a huge operational cost and lack of efficiency.

The client was running and managing its hosting services in an OpenShift Container Platform on VM clusters on AWS. With SNP’s support, the client validated that it could run its hosting service in a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Azure. Utilizing Go-Fast funding and SNP’s internal resources, SNP helped the client migrate clusters from OpenShift on AWS to Azure Kubernetes Services.

After successfully migrating their infrastructure from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Azure, the client’s infrastructure management time has reduced by 80% with managed support from SNP. In the next two years, the client is looking to fully support their Azure Kubernetes environment with their proprietary product.

The client and its subsidiaries are one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance and specialty insurance.

The client was developing a new line of business application, having modern, microservices architecture. During the development phase, the microservices were packed in Docker containers and run on the local server. However, for production deployment, the client IT team determined that container orchestration was imperative. For orchestration, Kubernetes was the obvious choice for its features, low-cost, and dominance in the market.

The client IT team concluded that maintenance of an on-premises Kubernetes cluster was not practical. The hardware and the maintenance cost, lack of cluster auto-scale capacity and simply not having the internal know-how.

Another significant requirement of the client was integration with SQL Server and file share data services running in an on-premises data center.

SNP Technologies identified Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) for a pilot implementation as it met all the orchestration requirements of the customer, included virtual network and Azure Identity integration as a managed service. AKS shifted the cluster maintenance responsibility from the client team to Microsoft.

Another captivating feature of Azure Kubernetes Services was its Azure Monitor integration for observing the health and performance of both the cluster and the running containers. To get the client production ready, SNP leveraged a host of other technologies like Azure DevOps for Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines, Azure Container Registry, and Azure Key Vault.

With SNP’s solution in place, the customer achieved the foundation for its on-going implementation of modern, cloud-native applications. Now the client is in a firm position with AKS to rapidly evolve its digital experiences and compete in reinsurance market.

The client is a durable medical equipment company that provides respiratory therapy services, medical equipment, and equipment cleaning supplies.

With a global presence, the client was looking to modernize their legacy applications running on the Rackspace infrastructure by leveraging cloud native services with Azure. SNP worked closely with the client’s IT team to perform an application assessment and prepared a detailed Application Modernization roadmap by leveraging Azure services like Azure Kubernetes, Application Program Interface Management, Azure Active Directory, Azure DevOps, and Azure Framework with Azure Governance and Security.

After SNP successfully completed the project, the client experienced changes in their productivity and consumption of Azure resources. The most noteworthy impact that client experienced with the reduction in the overhead costs in Azure Subscriptions and overall organizational cloud governance policy needs. They also experienced enhanced security after successful implementation of the Azure Unified Security. Azure DevOps along with Azure Kubernetes Cluster helped the client to automate the build and release management.

The client is a leading post-acute service solutions provider that provides medical products, distribution services, biomedical repair & maintenance, medical device sale & rental, and patient technology solutions.

Their data infrastructure consisted of an on-premises database, SQL servers, and SSRs reports. To better leverage data analytics and visualization, they wanted to modernize their current data warehouse with the cloud.

When we first spoke with the client, they were considering both Azure and Amazon Web Services so we walked them through an in-depth analysis of the Azure data platform components, technical benefits, performance, integration options, and SLA benefits. They ultimately decided that Azure was the solution that best fit their needs and we undertook the process of design, implementation and management of the modern data warehouse solution.

After leveraging the complete functionality of Azure Data Factory and Power BI for data analytics and visualization, the client can now extract and analyze data on their parameters. The client has seen a significant improvement in their decision making with following advantages:

• The client has not reported any downtime till date from the launch in June 2018.

• The client streamlined their analytics and generates real-time reports with Power BI.

• Data-driven reporting helped the client’s finance team plan their marketing strategy and financial expenditure in multiple areas of their business.

• Financial leakage in terms of receivable and payable transactions can now be interpreted for greater insight into their business.

The client is a national HIT services company delivering state of the art technology solutions globally.

Having such a huge and importance presence in the country, the client was running their offices, network and server infrastructure on a hosted datacenter that was running on a VMWare base. The client approached SNP to move their hosted datacenter to Azure. SNP worked closely with the client to perform a cloud assessment of their existing infrastructure and prepared a detailed cloud migration roadmap with Hybrid cloud strategy for stable, secure, high performance of workloads running on Azure.

The client migrated to Azure with zero data loss. They could optimize the Azure virtual machines depending on their business requirements.

The client is a physician-led clinically integrated network committee to offer patients the best experience in care.

With such a huge network of healthcare professionals and services, the client received too many requests, too frequently for its system to handle. The client’s data analytics expenditure hit through the roof and their informatics team spent 80% of their time aggregating and normalizing the data.

They were looking for a quick turnaround to new data requests and ingest data from a wide range of sources. They wanted the system to have built-in scalability with the capability to handle extremely large data sets. They also wanted self-servicing and real-time data analysis and predictive analytics.

SNP Technologies partnered with the client for a turnaround in their data analytics. By leveraging technologies like Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure PaaS to implement an enterprise data warehouse and analytics solution. We helped the client save an estimate of $100,000 a year – for the first 3 years after implementation. Customized algorithms, real-time data analytics, and predictive analytics generated operational reports which led to data-driven decisions. The staff now spends 10% of their time aggregating normalizing data and 90% of their time analyzing the data. The historical data was cut down by 25% — reducing the overall cost significantly.

"We are a data-driven organization and data is our lifeblood. We needed to implement an enterprise data warehouse and analytics capability efficiently and on budget with our in-house team. Having worked with SNP on previous projects allowed us to build a trusting relationship. We also observed and benefitted from their expertise with Microsoft cloud technologies. SNP has augmented our staff by covering all our data warehouse and analytics expertise gaps. They have also worked closely with our organization to create a realistic budget for the project. We could not have successfully taken on this project without SNP’s partnership.”- Director of Healthcare Informatics & Technology

We worked with one of the leading companies that manufacture protective industrial and medical gloves to implement data platform and Business Intelligence solution that would measure retail, sales, market share, and productive share for partnering firms.

The client was looking for a solution that would let them ditch their legacy system running on-premise on Informatica for a more robust, scalable and enterprise level data warehouse solution. The client’s internal team and the project sponsors were quite familiar with cutting edge capabilities of Azure Data Services; this allowed us to collaboratively design and build a progressive solution to handle their Data Engineering and Artificial Intelligence use cases. The solution template allows the company to very quickly ramp its new clients on the application by simply filling out some data source metadata and pushing some buttons. The organization can now get its new clients up and running in a couple days, plugging each one into amazing insights on their retail data.

This modern data platform architecture leveraging Azure Databricks has turned out to be a boon for the client in many ways. Some of the most noteworthy benefits experienced by the client include high scalability & elasticity, event-driven processing, flexibility of processing multiple programming languages, fast and cheap storage from Azure Data Lake Store, and no relational database.

The client is a privately held company, specializing in the design and manufacturing of separation, material handling and inspection equipment used throughout process industries like food, plastics and chemicals, mining, aggregates, metalworking and recycling.

The unmanaged cloud expenditure was proving to be a costly affair for the client with their development and testing costs often exceeding the budget. The client was looking for a solution through which they could reduce their monthly spending on an Azure subscription. They were also looking to monitor monthly spending with granular monitors for all deployed resources. The client approached SNP to get complete visibility on usage and spending of each workload in their environments.

To help the client with their cloud cost controlling measures, SNP technologies came up with several solutions that helped the client. SNP started monitoring all resources and collected complete details like usage and spending on a monthly basis. To start off with, SNP prepared daily reports on spending details, by services and resources. SNP’s solution is not restricted to just monitoring spending, but we also provided a solution through optimizing. SNP calculated and provided the estimation to the client before deploying the resources.

To get the client production-ready, SNP leveraged multiple technologies like Cloud and Azure Cost Management & Billing service.

SNP’s cost management services helped the client overcome the budgeting challenges. The client was not just able to keep their Azure subscription charges at minimal, they could also better plan for resource allocation and keep costs under control. Some of the most notable changes experienced by the client are the following:

• By implementing the cost analysis by service/resource and time, the client has complete visibility over their resources.

• They are in a better position to control expenditure by finding where they need to restrict in order to reduce the billing.

• By costing by day report, the client has the knowledge on what charges are made at any time.

• SNP has provided them with the list of stale resources, helping them get rid of all the stale/unused resources in the subscription.

The client is the industry leader in creating next-generation products for sports, recreation, protection, and personal use.

Due to the nature of their business, the client needed their website to be up and running 24*7*365 days. Their business required a website that could scale up the performance based on the inflowing traffic. They wanted a solution with built-in scalability, high availability, and load balancing to handle around 50k+ new user sessions on a regular basis.

The problem-solving process started with SNP undertaking a deep engagement with the client to define their business objectives and understand the performance challenges they faced with their previous website. SNP proposed designing the client’s new website on Drupal and hosting it on the Azure platform for overall enhanced performance.

To get the client production-ready, SNP leveraged technologies like Nagios, Drupal and Linux Web Services.

The client was able to curb its downtime considerably during the peak customer inflow hours and all the while the system would scale up the performance to match the traffic. The most significant changes experienced by the client are the following:

• There was a visible improvement in the performance and rendering of data.

• Significant cost reductions for infrastructure management.

•Scheduled server checks with the Center for Internet Security ensured that servers met industry best practices for implementation.

•The client observed 100,000+ user sessions with zero performance issues on a campaign day.

The client deals with planning, design, and construction management of water and wastewater-related projects – from clean water treatment, storage, and distribution to wastewater and stormwater collection, treatment, and reuse.

The client had developed an algorithm to predict the speed of water streams on an hourly basis to plan resources in their water treatment plan. They faced issues with the algorithm that was sitting in a silo, preventing multiple data scientists/developers from working on it together and provided a challenge in creating multiple versions of their algorithm. Additionally, they were looking to capture model performance in development environment and to automate their machine learning workflow using Azure for orchestration of production data.

The client required a data model which would take care of model development, model tuning, model versioning, and model deployment. In addition to the above data platform the client wanted a scheduled job to run on an hourly basis to fetch data from Azure SQL database, pass the data as input to the deployed model, retrieve the predictions and load them in Azure SQL database.

To cater to client needs, SNP leveraged Azure Machine Learning Service for deploying client algorithm on to the cloud and Azure components to deliver a cost-effective and scalable data model platform and hourly job.

The client has started using the Data Factory pipeline (scheduled as an hourly job) to generate Power BI reports to cater to their BI needs and to plan resources in their water treatment plant by looking at the predictions coming from the model sitting on Azure.

Being the leading providers of reinsurance and specialty insurance, the client had most of their workloads on their on-premise datacenters with a minute presence of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. Their on-premise primary datacenter and the DR datacenter were located in East USA.The client and one of its subsidiaries shared primary data centers but had separate AWS subscriptions and hybrid connectivity.

SNP partnered with the client to implement ADFS, Single Sign-On, Self Service Password Reset and integration with other forests as per the clients’ requirement. We designed and implemented the hybrid cloud and established hybrid connectivity with on-premises datacenters to various cloud isolated networks. SNP helped the client to implement ADFS infrastructure for supporting on-premises and Azure applications Single Sign-On experience. The client also wanted to deploy a pilot for Azure Site Recovery for DR and applications running on Azure.

With SNP’s help the client implemented and is managing best practices with Azure Governance and Azure Policies. The client has taken the next step in Azure transitioning with:

• Rollout of Azure Site Recovery for their production environment.

• Production SQL migration to Azure PaaS.

• Pilot for DRaaS with Azure Site Recovery and backup.

The client has expertise in a wide array of value creation activities, including distressed investments and uncovering value in complex transactions.

The client has a Hyper-V infrastructure and was looking for a disaster recovery and cloud failover. We performed a cloud assessment where it was discovered that the client has noted several server running on legacy operating systems and other with operating systems that are nearing the end of life. The total legacy operating system percentage is 28%, which is a significant percentage to be unprotected.

We partnered with the client and prepared a detailed cloud migration roadmap with a Hybrid Cloud strategy for enhanced stability, security and high performance of the workloads running on Azure IaaS. SNP leveraged Azure Governance to achieve control over Azure subscriptions, cost management, secured access management of Azure resources and to meet overall policies of the organization. Hybrid connectivity was achieved by establishing connectivity between Azure Virtual Network and private cloud as per the clients’ requirement.

The client has experienced better IT service deliver post implementation. Now they are in a better position to control over Azure subscriptions, security and overall organizational cloud governance policy needs.

The client is an industry leading investigative, compliance and cyber defense services firm based in North East.

Using a Hyper-V infrastructure for their on-premise environment, which was supported by clustered file services and SQL servers, the clients’ business plans were hit by frequent outages at their on-premise data center as well as during hardware failure. This posed a risk of data loss, which would prove catastrophic for the client as they were not being able to perform their duties to their full potential.

We partnered with the client as they approached us to set up a disaster recovery environment leveraging Azure Site recovery to provide short recovery time and lower compute cost. SNP worked with the client to collect information on their existing infrastructure like network bandwidth, server infrastructure, server specifications etc and DR Architecture Diagram, which was used as a modelling tool for implementation.

Aided by our DR solution, the client is now in a better position to protect their data and critical business applications. The client eliminated the need to configure and manage consoles on separate locations with cloud-based centralized ASR console.

The client is a software auditing company specializing in portal software, controls, audits and analytics software, and recovery audit service in virtually every country to produce billions in documented savings and income each year.

They wanted to move to Azure and implement Disaster Recovery solution for their critical business applications which consist of eight different layers. Through this implementation they want to streamline their overpayments process, supplier compliance process and optimize working capital.

SNP partnered with the client to implement the solution in three stages, in first stage we performed infrastructure discovery and migration assessment of their current on-premises infrastructure. The second stage was dedicated to setup the disaster recovery process which included Azure Site Recovery. The third and the final stage of implementation was completed with failover testing.

The client saw a drastic reduction in the time spent monitoring off-site replication status and resolving stalled or failed workload replications. SNP’s cost effective, centrally managed and comprehensive DR solution helped the client to deliver better protection for their critical business applications, reduce disaster recovery time and overhead costs.

The client and its subsidiaries are one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance and specialty insurance.

The client was developing a new line of business application, having modern, microservices architecture. During the development phase, the microservices were packed in Docker containers and run on the local server. However, for production deployment, the client IT team determined that container orchestration was imperative. For orchestration, Kubernetes was the obvious choice for its features, low-cost, and dominance in the market.

The client IT team concluded that maintenance of an on-premises Kubernetes cluster was not practical. The hardware and the maintenance cost, lack of cluster auto-scale capacity and simply not having the internal know-how.

Another significant requirement of the client was integration with SQL Server and file share data services running in an on-premises data center.

SNP Technologies identified Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) for a pilot implementation as it met all the orchestration requirements of the customer, included virtual network and Azure Identity integration as a managed service. AKS shifted the cluster maintenance responsibility from the client team to Microsoft.

Another captivating feature of Azure Kubernetes Services was its Azure Monitor integration for observing the health and performance of both the cluster and the running containers. To get the client production ready, SNP leveraged a host of other technologies like Azure DevOps for Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines, Azure Container Registry, and Azure Key Vault.

With SNP’s solution in place, the customer achieved the foundation for its on-going implementation of modern, cloud-native applications. Now the client is in a firm position with AKS to rapidly evolve its digital experiences and compete in reinsurance market.

This client is a trusted flood insurance provider known for their industry-leading expertise.

Lack of transparency and clarity in their data analytics prohibited them from reviewing the premium collection status based on monthly/quarterly/yearly basis. They needed a data analytics solution that allowed them to make decisions informed by insured premium patterns, product revenue collection, performance in the market, agent commission distribution & hierarchy, and product performance patters zone and city wide.

To achieve the client's goal of having improved data analytics and visualization, an effective solution to extract data from AS400 was needed, with the ability to scale up while minimizing the operational costs.

After leveraging the complete functionality of Azure Data Factory and Power BI for data analytics and visualization, the client can now extract and analyze data on their parameters. The client has seen a significant improvement in their decision making, along with the following advantages:

• They managed to save time and money by crunching big data and automating data pipelines with Azure Data Factory.Microsoft Azure reduced their cost of mainlining a highly expensive on-premise data solution.

• With Azure SQL Warehouse, the client is now able to alleviate data storage requirements.

• After implementing SNP’s solution, the client can transform the raw data into rich visualizations to make better decisions.

This client is a trusted partner with a track record of delivering high-volume sales and maximizing the return on investment for top health, life, property, and casualty providers.

We partnered with the client to deploy a designated application system on AKS as a pilot and also trained them in the use of Kubernetes orchestration for the docker containers and on the AKS platform in particular.

The client has seen a significant improvement in the speed and efficiency of its IT service delivery, including:

• 16 client engineers with programming, operations, DevOps responsibilities were trained and are now familiar with container and orchestration fundamentals and their implementation in Azure.

• Client DevOps team now can create AKS clusters and securely deploy containerized applications using their familiar CI/CO tooling.

• The client considers AKS as a primary deployment tool for Linux container workloads.

• They’ve cut costs and improved performance.

The client is an international architecture and design firm recognized for developing exceptional architectural design solutions that generate business results in the workplace, community, healthcare and retail industries.

The client was running their offices, server & network infrastructure, virtual desktop infrastructure on a hosted data center. The client was using Horizon virtual desktops and running in VMWare platform. The client has their offices across America and clients all around the world and increasing, their existing system was unable to handle the data influx. The client faced troubles in scaling up which resulted in huge operational costs and lack of efficiency.

SNP Technologies partnered with the client to migrated them to Microsoft Azure. We leveraged technologies like Azure IaaS and Citrix VDI to make the client production ready. The client has seen a remarkable improvement in the speed and efficiency of its IT service delivery. The Azure migration has provided the client a stable, secure, high performance of virtual desktops running on Azure IaaS. Some of the most significant improvements the client experienced include:

• The client now operates on a highly stable Azure IaaS with zero downtime from the date of migration.

• The client’s infrastructure management time has reduced by 80% with support from SNP’s managed services team.

The client is an architecture, design and engineering firm using graphic intensive applications such as Autodesk and SolidWorks, which require more than the average amount of hardware resources to operate properly.

As a 100% cloud-focused partner, SNP leveraged Citrix Cloud Virtual App and Desktop services to save on compute costs and the cost of deploying and maintaining a Citrix environment.

Some of the benefits our client experienced are:

• They can now onboard new customers in a seamless and effortless manner.

• Windows 10 delivered the best user experience to our client by leveraging GPU-enabled Azure N-Series VMs running on Windows.

• End users got high-end Windows 10 desktop in the cloud with pre-installed applications they need to get their work done, all the while keeping the data locked down and secured from one management location.

• The client decreased the Azure compute cost by leveraging the auto scale feature of Citrix.

• SNP leveraged Citrix Gateway services present globally which included Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. This allowed users to connect to nearest location.

• SNP Technologies included features like high availability and global server load balancing in the solution without having to configure complicated networking architectures.