Energy Services Company Leverages New Market Opportunity with Microsoft Azure Cloud Solution from ePlus
Streamlines customer onboarding with a predictable cost model while maintaining a sharp focus on core business of driving software innovation
Business Challenges
Challenge 1
New government compliance requirements created a unique market for renewable energy production across the customer’s target industry. They wanted to build a new offering to capture this business opportunity while driving operational efficiency and service availability with minimized capital investment.
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Challenge 2
The organization’s existing data center and connectivity were not able to support this added workload without major upgrades.
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Challenge 3
They required the ability to rapidly respond to demand and growth with seamless and just-in-time scalability.
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Challenge 4
In addition, the customer needed to provide network segmentation and an enhanced security posture for the data and service access external to their corporate assets.
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Why ePlus?
- ePlus is a market leader in helping customers achieve their business goals through creative technical solutions.
- ePlus had an existing relationship with the customer providing them their security, network, and data center services and hardware.
- As the customer looked to extend their solution into the cloud, ePlus had the Azure Cloud Services expertise and was a natural partner to help evolve their capabilities and deliver the solution they desired.
Solution
Azure Cloud Services for Operational Technology Supporting Industrial Automation
- ePlus engaged with the customer to discover the business and technical requirements for the application in scope.
- Through a series of design sessions, ePlus created an Azure cloud solution that would meet the requirements of the application and allow the organization to scale to meet the demands of their customers.
- Security and segmentation were addressed as a key design component, including FortiGate firewalls for network security and segmentation.
- The ePlus solution used SD-WAN to connect multiple customer deployments to a centralized control and monitoring environment in Azure.
- The customer engaged ePlus to design and build the Azure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) foundation, facilitating the centralization of core IT services and connectivity from remote sites supporting the industrial automation initiative. ePlus Cloud Consulting Services included Azure Governance, SD-WAN underlay networking, and network security services. Once designed and accepted, ePlus deployed the design and tested connectivity and traffic flows before handing it off to the customer to instantiate their Azure virtual machines.
Business Outcomes
- With the solution in place, the customer is poised to leverage the new renewal energy market opportunities with minimal capital investment, allowing them to scale revenue in alignment with costs.
- The customer was able to rapidly build a new environment and begin onboarding customers, driving operational efficiencies and speeding response to growth and demand with enhanced scalability.
- The solution has no dependencies on the customer’s data center and is designed to support regional disaster recovery in the future, providing a single, secure, and scalable cloud environment through which they can monitor their industrial automation devices and operationally manage them from a single site.
- The customer can move beyond existing networking segmentation constraints within their data center, allowing for a purpose-built solution delivering segmentation from their corporate network while restricting direct access to the platform. The solution also adds an extra network layer of insulation between the remote sites and their corporate network in alignment with the Purdue Model for ICS Security.
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