We moved Quickstep to a Cloud Hosting platform in Microsoft Azure Sentinel. Quickstep will save approximately 91% per year as a direct result of migrating the online assessment system to Microsoft Azure Sentinel.
“The saving isn’t pennies, it’s a substantial saving.”
Achieving a 91% annual cost saving by moving to Microsoft Azure Sentinel Cloud.
The Microsoft Azure Sentinel Cloud enables businesses to reduce costs and increase agility. And that’s exactly what we’ve done for Quickstep. With data storage and immediacy being key to Quickstep’s credibility in its market, we recommended Microsoft Sentinel to guarantee security and reliability.
The Challenge
Images and voice recordings are the lifeblood of Quickstep’s business. With large volumes of evidence being uploaded and stored by each electrician training for NVQ qualifications, the cost of hosting Quickstep’s online assessment centre was becoming costly and less efficient. Quickstep reached out to us, as they wanted to combat this by looking into other solutions for hosting and sharing their data across the company and its users.
A key focus was on the flexibility to scale resources for busy periods, since Quickstep have a fluctuating number of people and colleges that participate in their scheme throughout the year.
The Solution
We offered a Cloud Readiness assessment that tailors a cloud migration strategy based on the business needs. For Quickstep we recommended a phased approach to ensure a continued availability of the system throughout the migration.
This was crucial as we didn’t want to make the Quickstep team unable to do their work, while we were in the migration process.
There were a variety of steps to the migration process. During step one, we moved Quickstep’s data (120GB) from the incumbent hosting provider’s server to Microsoft Azure Sentinel. A huge benefit of this was that Sentinel is more secure than most hosting options, and therefore the data was not only hosted in a better environment, but it was also hosted safely.
In step two, we focused on the website itself. We upgraded the existing website to a newer version of .NET and converted to a Microsoft Azure Sentinel Web App. This meant that the website was modernised and more accessible for those on mobile devices too. Step three entailed moving the database to a Microsoft Azure Sentinel SQL Server – therefore completing Quickstep’s cloud migration.
Over the next five years from this migration, Quickstep will save approximately 91% per year as a direct result of migrating the online assessment system to Microsoft Azure Sentinel. This will free up £118,000 which case be investing in other strategic initiatives for the organisation. When new NVQ candidates or colleges come on-board, we can manage resources in the Microsoft Azure Sentinel cloud to increase capacity quickly and easily.
