The approach: CBS migrates AAM’s IT infrastructure to CloudMetro 

CBS was recommended to AAM by another vendor, so AAM requested a proposal for the scope of the project.  

“Canon Business Services had the best level of maturity, knowledge and capability when working through the infrastructure.”

CBS then consulted with AAM’s IT division to understand their challenges, goals and current infrastructure before developing a transition plan.  

With fortnightly client meetings and regular phone catch ups, CBS collaborated with AAM’s internal team to transition their on-premise hardware and Telstra Cloud to CBS’ own CloudMetro infrastructure. 

The process included: 

1. Risk and issues analysis
2. Detailed design and technical analysis
3. Execution that included

• Building a new environment in CloudMetro
• Setting up the network
• Migrating servers and data
• Testing and confirmation
  

AAM chose CloudMetro because it could be rolled out quickly and deliver an instant performance improvement, while removing the risk and hassle of self-managed IT infrastructure by employing CBS’ managed cloud services. There is also future potential to integrate CloudMetro with Microsoft Azure. 

AAM reaps the benefits of a stable and secure cloud-first environment 

The entire transition project was complete within 12 weeks – ahead of schedule and 20% under budget.  

“Even when we threw some curveballs at them and changed our plans last minute, nothing was too hard and they managed to finish the migration ahead of schedule and under budget.”

AAM report they have seen a vast range of positive benefits, such as: 

• Great service, above and beyond expectations
• More stable employee applications
• Secure environment
• Excellent backups, with response within a few hours
• Team don’t have to worry about aspects CBS manage
• IT staff have more time to focus on higher level tasks, including UX
• Greater ability to work remotely
• Lower risk and stress with cloud managed services
• Annual governance presentation is easier with CBS’ processes and evidence support

The Future

Moving forward, AAM is working with CBS to evaluate the benefits of a hybrid approach that incorporates Microsoft Azure.  

“Our new hosted infrastructure environment means we can finally sleep at night!” says AAM’s IT manager. “We have found the service to be reliable, consistent and so much easier to manage. Being virtualized, this also means we no longer need remote hands in hard-to-get to locations - which is even better with COVID-19 making travel so difficult these days. 

“Support tickets are dealt with quickly and effectively, and ultimately it has significantly reduced the amount of hours a week we need to spend managing our infrastructure.

“Looking to the future, we're planning to consolidate our infrastructure with CBS even further. The next phase of our migration plan will look to leverage their Azure stack services, and start the process of discovering how we can implement VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) to move our workloads into the cloud as well as our hosted infrastructure.”