John Keells IT supports IT infrastructure migration at Rockland Distilleries Ltd.

John Keells IT Cloud Solution and Services team

John Keells IT (JKIT) recently launched a project to migrate IT infrastructure to MS Azure cloud at Rockland Distilleries Ltd., with the aim of enhancing its SAP application performance, agility and

Rockland Distilleries Group CIO Ranga Karunaratna

John Keells IT Chief Operating Officer Nishan Thevathason

stability.

The Azure infrastructure for SAP is a leading solution to run mission-critical SAP ERP operations on the cloud while reducing the total cost of computing and significantly accelerating investment time to benefit. The team at John Keells IT closely assessed the then-existing on-premises data center with an onboard Disaster Recovery (DR) solution of the Rockland Distilleries and introduced the Azure project where a migration of IT infrastructure to Microsoft Azure cloud was implemented successfully, with many benefits to the organisation.     

Cloud Adoption is a key milestone to bringing the organisation closer to driving a digital transformation journey and provides the flexibility of scalable on-demand infrastructure which eliminates on-premises hardware limitations and the reduction in current cost spent on Capex. Accessibility to a wide range of services on Azure Platform Services can be achieved through this latest implementation.   

“Moving to Azure on cloud, away from on-premise hardware was the most logical step for Rockland Distilleries as it opened up the means to scale workloads on-demand while also benefiting from a significantly improved service up-time,” stated John Keells IT Chief Operating Officer Nishan Thevathason.   

Azure is a robust, reliable public cloud platform that offers critical advantages for essential applications, including SAP, which has been a fundamental requirement for many organisations like Rockland Distilleries. 

Advantages include the provision of extra capacity in the short-term to perform tasks like the archival of the SAP ERP system, accelerated speed of provisioning, built-in tooling which provides robust tools for implementing and managing workstreams by reducing management overhead and pay-for-use which requires payment only for the actual usage of the Azure resources. 

Azure also provides ‘Reserved Instances’, a price model for customers to reduce costs up to 72% compared to a ‘pay-as-you-go model’ with one or three-year terms on Windows and Linux virtual machines, and Azure Hybrid Benefit, which is a licensing benefit that helps to significantly reduce the costs of the running workloads in the cloud. It also offers high-speed connectivity in 50 regions and availability in 140 Countries with more than 1,500 peering points for express routing which is exceptionally higher than other public cloud providers. 

Rockland Distilleries Group CIP Ranga Karunaratna said: “Working with John Keells IT was a wonderful experience. They are process-oriented and have a diverse skill set. We sought a partner that is passionate about providing trustworthy solutions and, most importantly, who is culturally compatible with Rockland Distilleries. John Keells IT not only met our objectives but also completed one of the most spectacular migration projects in the industry.”

Through this six-month-long migration process, Rockland Distilleries gained massively on their performance capacity, and the system availability and performance were also enhanced to a greater extent, enabling the company to perform operations with reduced lag and downtime. The premium disk storage usage also contributed in this regard as it enabled a much-improved level of performance compared to the on-premise storage used previously. System security and monitoring were greatly streamlined with dedicated solutions such as Azure Security Centre which provides low-cost and efficient means to secure the company’s IT ecosystem and monitor it remotely via a single dashboard. Using Azure virtual desktop provides a more secure hybrid workplace experience when accessing the company data and apps.