Client story Insight helps Xerius adopt Azure cloud-first approach
By Insight Editor / 17 Jan 2023
By Insight Editor / 17 Jan 2023
Xerius is a Belgian enterprise counter and social insurance fund with 214,000 active selfemployed and 118,000 affiliated companies.
To process their customers’ valuable data, they adopted a cloud-first approach with Microsoft Azure. While Xerius has many in-house skills thanks to an extensive IT team, they collaborated with Insight for consultancy and support.
Xerius has developed a roadmap to migrate most applications from their on-prem environment to Microsoft Azure. The company has several reasons for taking a cloudfirst approach. In addition to expected cost reduction, Xerius understands that a cloud environment is necessary to quickly respond to new trends and have access to the latest technologies.
While Xerius has the basic skills in-house, they were looking for an external partner with enough expertise to assist them from to A to Z during this multi-year project, and help define and execute their Azure migration strategy.
“Insight’s consultants have a lot of technical knowledge and provided everything we need to complete our migration. What makes the cooperation even more enjoyable is the fact that they are very approachable people who communicate openly and are available when we need their help.” - Toon Hendrickx, Group IT Manager at Xerius
When Xerius decided to partner with Insight, the first step of the project was to design a roadmap. In this respect, cloud migration can be compared to building a house: you have to lay the foundation before you can do anything else. Therefore, Insight reached out to its partner Microsoft to conduct an Azure Readiness assessment. The outcome was a report that answered several important questions. What workloads can be moved quickly from the on-prem environment to Azure and which applications require more effort? What are the costs of this migration? And how about governance and security?
The assessment report served as a foundation for Xerius and Insight to create a roadmap for the migration of most workloads to Azure over the course of the coming years. The first big project was the file server migration. In the span of nearly three months, Xerius migrated as much as 17 TB of data to the cloud. In the process, their IT team was able to rely on advice and documentation from two Azure experts at Insight who acted as a dedicated point of contact. Because Xerius is working with a lot of sensitive data, Insight further assisted their IT people with a number of security projects.
The first migration has already proved its worth to Xerius. It allows the company to save costs and become more agile thanks to the speed of the discs and the flexibility to increase or decrease storage.
“For Xerius, Insight is a long-term partner. They really make an effort to help us build a strategy for the future.” - Toon Hendrickx, Group IT Manager at Xerius
Insight’s Azure experts have vast experience in cloud migration projects. Open communication and smooth collaboration allowed them to provide efficient support and transfer their knowledge to Xerius’ IT team.
This enables Insight to build a long-term relationship with Xerius and better understand the company’s needs and challenges. In the coming years, Insight will continue to help Xerius execute the different sub-projects defined on the cloud roadmap.
