EnviDan’s move to cloud is not a money-saving exercise. Cloud is a change of roadmap, and Azure will accelerate the time to market for EnviDan-developed applications.
EnviDan developed software in-house on local machines until the beginning of 2020 when the company started preparing to migrate its entire development environment to Azure.
“Azure provides us with the usual advantages of cloud, reducing our total costs of running and developing software applications. But our cloud first approach is not a money-saving exercise. Cloud is a change of roadmap, and Azure will accelerate our time to market for newly developed software,” says Morten Klank, Head of Cloud Services, EnviDan’s in-house developer team consisting of approx. 20 employees.
“Our strategy for our digital platform is cloud first. We’re replacing more and more of our applications with cloud components, leveraging the same tools across our development environment, particularly within AI and machine learning where Azure offers some extremely strong development tools,” Morten states.
Just before the 2020 summer holidays, EnviDan partnered with Automize on cloud infrastructure and by end-September, the project of migrating EnviDan’s development environment to Azure was successfully completed.
“Finding a partner who strikes the right balance between operational and strategic is essential for the success of a project of this magnitude. Automize has a well-thought-out and tested approach – they use their previous experience and don’t waste time or money reinventing the wheel,” says Morten.
He elaborates: “Automize’s attitude was: ‘We’ve done this many times before. We suggest using this naming convention which is also used by Microsoft’. In this way we were able to agree on all naming convention aspects at a one-hour meeting instead of a three-day workshop.”
Automize tailors Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework to the size and complexity of the individual company – an effective approach according to Morten.
“Automize built the entire landing zone using a 3-tier architecture with development, testing and production, and with complete control of infrastructure and network, access, subscriptions, payment, and security, providing an option for other departments in our organization to use Azure functionality with, for example, sandboxes and development within machine learning,” says Morten.
After developing around 30 business-critical applications over the last ten years, EnviDan has completed comprehensive testing at application level before migrating to Azure.
“We’ve redeployed our entire development and testing environment in Azure, and the project has progressed at a reasonable cadence. Automize has been excellent at securing pragmatic progress while ensuring that all security measures were considered,” tells Morten
As Morten describes it, EnviDan has handled project management of the application subproject, while Automize has handled the infrastructure subproject.
“Project management has been a joint effort between Automize and EnviDan. The process has been positive and smooth, and Automize has shown great flexibility throughout the process,” says Morten.
He provides an example: “Three days before cutover, we were forced to postpone the cutover date because one of our clients had scheduled an operational test on that exact day. Automize’s reaction was: ‘Oh well, no problem’. We postponed the cutover date two weeks, and at cutover, everything worked.”
The entire project of migrating to Azure has been done remotely, and it has worked tremendously well, says Morten.
“Working virtually comes natural to our team. We hold lots of meetings in Teams and we keep everything in our Teams channel. Automize immediately tapped into our way of working, which helped prevent any impact on the project from the coronavirus outbreak in the spring of 2020. We were already working remotely.”
“Throughout the process, Automize has taken a pragmatic and operational approach to the job, which has been vital to the success of the project,” says Morten and concludes: “We will definitely be working with Automize in the future. They are really cool and basically someone you would go for a drink with.”
EnviDan is a consultancy and engineering company with offices in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The company’s in-house developer team, Cloud Services, develops and sells software as a service to the Scandinavian utilities sector, for example, real-time control of wastewater treatment plants, tools for water distribution system planning or software for automatic detection of leaks in sewer and water lines.
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“Automize has a well-thought-out and tested approach – they use their previous experience and don’t waste time or money reinventing the wheel.” |
“Throughout the process, Automize has taken a pragmatic and operational approach to the job, which has been vital to the success of the project.” |
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