How this organisation can maintain UK trade and logistics with Softcat cloud services
Project at a Glance
A UK trade and logistics organisation with critical national operations partnered with Softcat to modernise and standardise its complex cloud environment. With multiple teams and third parties managing cloud services, the organisation needed a more automated, reliable and governed approach. Softcat delivered a holistic cloud and datacentre transformation, introducing standardised architectures, automation and a fully managed Azure platform to reduce risk, improve efficiency and support future growth.
global Microsoft Azure Expert MSP partners
standardised, centrally governed Azure platform supporting the organisation’s operations
Challenge
The organisation relied on a complex cloud environment that had been built and maintained by multiple internal teams and third parties, with little standardisation or automation. This made it increasingly difficult to harness critical trade and logistics data, manage risk, control costs and support ongoing expansion. The business needed to modernise its approach while meeting strict regulatory and operational requirements.
Critical Success Factors:
1
Reducing technical debt
Reduce technical debt arising from old ways of building and maintaining cloud platforms.
2
Smarter costs, greater reliability
Optimise costs while improving operational reliability and automation.
3
The right cloud partner
Engagement with a best-in-class cloud managed service partner.
Solution
Softcat worked closely with the organisation to define a cloud and datacentre strategy through a series of workshops, providing architectural oversight and a clear transformation roadmap. Existing Azure environments were re‑engineered to adopt Infrastructure as Code and automated pipelines, before being onboarded into Softcat’s fully managed Azure PlatformOps service. This delivered consistent standards, improved governance and ongoing optimisation, supported by Softcat’s cloud expertise and partner ecosystem.
- 24x7x365 Azure PlatformOps
- Re-engineering of all platforms including Infrastructure as Code (IAC), automation pipelines and deployment scanning
- Ongoing architectural oversight to help shape new projects in line with best practice and operational efficiency
Results
The organisation now benefits from a highly automated and standardised Azure platform, supported by continuous governance across security, reliability and cost. Softcat’s managed service has reduced technical debt, improved operational efficiency and provided a future‑proof foundation for new cloud‑based projects, giving the organisation confidence that its critical data and systems are well controlled and resilient.
- Reduction in technical debt that arose from legacy platform automation
- A mature partner to provide 24x7x365 Microsoft Azure PlatformOps
- Programmatic provisioning and management of the Azure platform via IAC (Terraform by Hashicorp) and automated pipelines (GitHub Actions)
The end-to-end process was extremely efficient, including the reverse engineering of our existing Azure platform, solutions and workloads from a manual provisioning method to that of highly automated and efficient process, leveraging Softcat skills and standards. We’re looking forward to the future of the partnership with Softcat any many cloud-based projects we can now tackle with peace of mind that we have the right controls and services to underpin our business and customer data.
Customer spokesperson.