Metinvest Moves to the Cloud

Following the political problems in eastern Ukraine, local steel and coal mining giant Metinvest decided to move its office productivity applications to the cloud for business continuity reasons. The decision to move away to Microsoft Office 365 was taken to ensure users would have access to cost-effective, stable and always-on service. Other benefits included reliable backup services and constantly upgraded functionality as well as savings in hardware costs, management time and licensing fees over a five year period.

Vital Partner Support

A further goal for 2015, meanwhile, is to introduce a pilot project to help the company evaluate Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform as a back-up data center for running the company’s central services on top of its two existing synchronized active-active data centers in Ukraine.

As for the current Office 365 initiative, Galagan said that the company could not have dealt with it as effectively as it did without the help of Microsoft’s Onboarding Center (OBC) and local partner, Conterra.

“When we decided to move to Office 365, we needed some help as we didn’t have any experience of public cloud solutions, but we needed to solve a lot of issues such as configuration in a very short time – and our partners helped us a lot,” he said.

Microsoft OBC helped the Metinvest team to define its requirements and devise a suitable architecture as well as provide all of the necessary technical information about the service. Conterra, because it was a long-term partner, on the other hand, was familiar with the organization’s existing infrastructure and undertook the necessary technical tasks such as configuration.

Mykola Bobukh, Conterra’s Commercial Director said: “This project was a great example of efficient teamwork. Because it started at the same time as Metinvest’s infrastructure consolidation initiative, it was necessary to double-check everything as we planned and implemented the hybrid solution in order to ensure there was no downtime. It was a unique experience.”

https://customers.microsoft.com/Pages/CustomerStory.aspx?recid=22225