Construction-Based Industrial Group

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Vision

Escalating virtualisation licensing costs, an ageing on-premises estate, and the looming expense of a hardware refresh prompted the Group to reconsider the foundations of its infrastructure. Recent changes to its incumbent virtualisation platform's licensing model had materially increased ongoing costs, while a sprawling virtual server estate had grown inefficient and difficult to protect. The organisation operated a hybrid, multi-site environment spanning corporate systems and specialised operational technology, which added complexity to any change.

estrat was engaged to assess the environment, prove the business case for change, and chart a pragmatic path forward. The review confirmed that migrating from VMware to Microsoft Hyper-V — a hypervisor already covered by the Group's existing Microsoft agreements — would remove a significant and rising cost, while a parallel rationalisation of the estate and a modern disaster recovery capability would reduce both risk and complexity. A clear, costed roadmap gave leadership the confidence to proceed.

Traction

With the business case approved, estrat led the end-to-end delivery: planning, project management, and the hands-on technical migration. Workloads were moved in carefully sequenced waves through a disciplined change process, with each machine validated before its predecessor was retired. Critical systems — including the Group's ERP and data warehouse — were transitioned with minimal disruption to daily operations, and a concurrent network upgrade improved connectivity while reducing carriage costs.

Alongside the migration, estrat rationalised the estate, decommissioning redundant and dormant servers to reduce the footprint by roughly 40 per cent. A multi-cloud disaster recovery solution was established using Azure Site Recovery, replicating production workloads to the cloud with recovery points measured in minutes. Backup integrity was verified across platforms, and failover testing confirmed the environment could be recovered with confidence. Even ageing and operational-technology systems across multiple sites were brought across successfully. estrat also managed the exit from a legacy data centre, coordinating the network changes and the orderly removal of redundant infrastructure.

Results

The Group now runs a leaner, modern virtualisation platform, having removed a significant and rising licensing cost by adopting a hypervisor already licensed within its Microsoft agreements. The estate is simpler to manage and protect, and for the first time enjoys tested, cloud-based disaster recovery with rapid recovery objectives.

Consolidating onto a single, well-understood platform has improved reliability and freed the internal team to focus on higher-value work. Ongoing workload optimisation — right-sizing resources and eliminating waste — continues to keep running costs under control, and the retirement of a legacy data centre has removed a further layer of cost and risk.

Delivered through close collaboration between the Group's IT team and estrat, the project has positioned the organisation for its next step: a planned migration of production workloads into the public cloud, again avoiding costly on-premises investment. It is a foundation built for efficiency, resilience and growth.