CASE STUDIES

Thinking Globally, Migrating Locally

A multinational food and consumer goods company accelerates the successful migration of 150+ subsidiaries to the cloud with the help of Solution Assessment services delivered by Apeiron

No two members of a family are truly identical. There may be similarities, but differences must be acknowledged and respected, particularly if the entire family is going to make a big change. So it is among multinational corporations as well. One large firm in the food and consumer goods space wanted to move its on-prem infrastructure into the cloud, but with subsidiaries in more than 150 countries, each operating with some degree of autonomy to meet local needs, such a move would not be easy. While company IT leaders were aware of many key pieces of the global application infrastructure, they did not have deep visibility into the intricacies characterizing each of the individual infrastructures.

They knew there were literally thousands of servers and peripheral devices in use, but exactly what they were doing — and whether they would be needed in a more modern cloud-based infrastructure — was unclear. The leaders understood the benefits of migrating key components of these on-prem infrastructures to the cloud — in terms of modernization, efficiency, cost, agility, and more — but they also understood that such a migration would have to be managed carefully and with the unique operational needs of each subsidiary in mind.

Given these complexities, the company turned to Apeiron for help. Apeiron’s well-established track record of delivering Solution Assessments that enable firms not only to understand the full extent of their infrastructures and their interdependencies but also to understand how to migrate those infrastructures to a new and more modern state was key to helping the company see a path forward.

Assessing the Situation

Fundamentally, the Solution Assessment program is designed both to construct a business case and a consumption plan. For this client, though, Apeiron designed an approach to Solution Assessment that could be conducted on a subsidiary-by-subsidiary basis rather than all at once on a global basis (even though the insights would roll up to provide global visibility into the existing infrastructure and dynamics). One core team comprised of personnel from Apeiron and key partners was able to orchestrate the delivery of individual Solution Assessment programs that would be tailored to the needs of each subsidiary and conducted by local resources. This streamlined both the onboarding of individual subsidiaries while ensuring that the needs of individual subsidiaries would be met.

The consumption plans developed for each subsidiary reflected this approach, too, identifying individual areas that could best be supported by a cloud provider’s technical resources, other areas that could be best supported by Cloud Migration Factory (CMF) personnel, and yet other areas that might best be supported by local partners. The recommended mix of technical specialists, CMF, and partner resources — as well as the timelines for migration — varied with the needs of each subsidiary. By developing an understanding of each subsidiary’s unique cloud journey and focusing on cost optimization, reliability, scalability, and sustainability, the Solution Assessments teams were able to hold fruitful discussions with individual subsidiaries and focus on how best to facilitate migration with local markets in mind.

Building on the Benefits of Modernization

For this multinational company, the Solution Assessment services delivered by Apeiron have been instrumental in facilitating a pivot that will have long term effects — for the company, its subsidiaries, and its customers. Climate change has introduced new levels of uncertainty into all aspects of life. How and where food is produced and consumed may change, and far more quickly than ever before. New kinds of crops may be developed; existing crops may be grown in wholly new places; and crops of all kinds may need to be distributed to different locations and evolving population centers. With the agility and efficiencies enabled by the cloud, each subsidiary — and the multinational corporation as a whole — gains an improved ability to respond rapidly to changes that might otherwise compromise the cultivation, distribution, and delivery of food and critical consumer goods.