- 24/07/2026
- 5:31 pm
A leading US IT service provider with more than 700 employees needed to move its entire on-premises estate — 300+ servers in a Chicago colocation datacentre — onto Microsoft Azure, without interrupting service to its own customers.
The client
The client is a leading IT service provider in the USA with 30+ years on the market, with offices across California, New York, and Illinois. The company operates with more than 700 employees nationwide.
The need
The client approached Star Knowledge to migrate their on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud. Ongoing IT difficulties were preventing consistent, reliable service delivery and customer support; the absence of speed and reliability had put client service in jeopardy.
The estate was housed in a Chicago colocation datacentre and had become slow, complicated, and unreliable. The 300+ servers suffered from repeated support issues, and managing them had become a challenge in itself.
The challenge
The on-premises infrastructure had become outdated and all 300+ servers had to be migrated without any end-user impact. Our team of Microsoft cloud migration specialists had to lay out a detailed migration plan and sequencing strategy.
The solution
1 A plan for sequencing, scheduling, and cutover of each individual workload.
2 Azure Site Recovery configured as the migration path for server workloads.
3 Full inventory assessment, migration runbooks, and defined migration steps.
4 Workloads moved in the planned sequence, validated at each cutover.
5 Legacy infrastructure retired once each workload was confirmed stable.
6 Ongoing patching and maintenance under a managed service arrangement.
Benefits
- Faster, more reliable infrastructure after the move off colocation.
- Lower maintenance cost, with hardware upkeep replaced by consumption-based Azure spend.
- Far fewer system issues, so the recurring incident load dropped sharply.
- Quicker client service, because teams could respond without infrastructure in the way.
Technology used
| Area | Technology |
|---|---|
Cloud platform | Microsoft Azure |
Migration | Azure Site Recovery |
Identity | Azure Active Directory |
Networking | Azure DNS |
Filed under
Azure
Professional services
Talk to us
