How Bossard Group implements its Cloud First strategy with Microsoft Azure and Baggenstos

Customer profile

The listed Bossard Group is a leading global provider of product solutions and services in industrial fastening and assembly technology. With more than one million articles and proven expertise in technical consulting and inventory management, the innovative company occupies an outstanding position in the smart factory segment. The company was founded in Zug in 1831 and today employs 2,500 people at 83 locations in 31 countries worldwide.

Azure Landing Zone for the successful migration

Bossard was nominated by Microsoft for the Azure Migration Programme AMP. We were selected as a migration partner due to our many years of in-depth Azure expertise. As a first step, we developed an Azure Landing Zone together with Bossard.

What are Azure Landing Zones?

Azure Landingzones lay the foundations in Azure so that in the future the cloud environment can be built and maintained according to clearly defined guidelines in terms of scaling, security, governance, network and identity. Azure Landing Zones serve as a common thread for building the Virtual Datacenter for the internal IT department and its external partners. The landing zone takes into account all Azure resources required to support the application portfolio. It does not differentiate between infrastructure as a service or platform as a service. With the Azure Landing Zone, a company has created the optimal conditions for application migration, modernisation and innovation.

Cloud Ready

Around a year after the project began in May 2020, Bossard has now tapped into the Azure Virtual Data Center and can now gradually outsource its workloads to the cloud, revise legacy applications and make them cloud-ready.

Stefan Müller, Vice President of IT Bossard AG, draws an all-round positive balance and recalls: "We have been working with Baggenstos since 2018. We have had excellent experiences with the competence of the Baggenstos team and therefore decided to carry out the complete transformation with Baggenstos. Azure Landingzone, Azure Virtual Desktop and now also the rollout of Teams are important milestones. We are very satisfied and look forward to the upcoming projects with Baggenstos."

Video: How Bossard implements its Cloud First strategy with Microsoft Azure

Facts and Figures

Initial situation and objective

Bossard's data centres were due for considerable investment. Therefore, the question arose as to whether the time had come for a cloud migration. With the Azure Migration Programme and the Baggenstos team, a proof of concept for the step into the Azure Cloud was provided and it became clear that the cloud solution was the right, forward-looking path.

The Bossard IT team dealt intensively with the relevant Azure topics and acquired comprehensive know-how and important Azure certifications. In collaboration with Baggenstos and Microsoft, the Azure Landing Zone document was developed and refined step by step until the first master version was ready.

Solutions

To enable Bossard to benefit from Azure services and their cost advantages as early as possible, the network for the virtual data centre was built and the expensive MPLS lines were replaced with Azure VWAN. This enabled massive cost savings to be realised with the same performance and security.

As part of the AMP, 50 VMs were migrated to Azure using Lift & Shift. This allowed the functionality of the Azure Landing Zone concept to be verified. The VMs were specifically selected in consultation with Bossard and optimised for Azure by Baggenstos after the migration.  

Furthermore, it was ensured that future resources would be created according to the Bossard naming convention. Azure policies are also used to force tagging during creation. This means that Bossard always receives cleanly broken down and meaningful invoices in the Baggenstos CSP Control Center and can monitor and analyse ongoing costs.

results

The Azure VWAN enabled Bossard to achieve a massive reduction in communication costs without compromising on security or performance.

With the Azure Landing Zone, a future-proof and consistent basis was created for further migration steps to Azure. With the Azure Virtual Data Center, the innovative company can now gradually outsource their workloads to the cloud.

For Bossard, it is now clear that they are on the right path into the future with a cloud-first strategy. Azure has passed the acid test as the basis for scalable, reliable and cost-effective digitisation.

Challenges

Bossard has the highest demands on its IT services and so an uninterrupted migration was a must for Bossard AG.

In regular meetings, the results were critically scrutinised, reviewed and optimised again and again so that the specialists from Microsoft and Baggenstos could optimally design the path to the Azure Cloud.

Many thanks for the good cooperation

We at Baggenstos would like to express our sincere thanks for the open and productive collaboration with the Bossard IT team. With the Cloud First Strategy, Azure Landingzone and the Azure Migration Programme, we were able to contribute to the fact that Bossard AG now has a sustainable and future-oriented basis for optimally shaping its further path into the cloud.

We look forward to realising further innovative and exciting projects with Bossard and thus making a contribution to the company's success.

Your first tep to the cloud

Cloud Readiness Workshop Project query