Kier Group builds the future by pivoting to the cloud with Azure VMware Solution

Building the future

Kier Group knows this well. As a leading UK infrastructure services, construction, and property group, its purpose is to sustainably deliver infrastructure vital to the UK and to leave lasting legacies through its work. To continue using the most innovative building approaches and cutting-edge technologies, however, Kier needed to modernize its digital infrastructure by migrating to the cloud. The company got there and is now realizing the power of the cloud with Microsoft Azure VMware Solution. 

From consolidation to migration

Over the past decade, Kier found itself growing significantly, both organically and through acquisitions. The result of this growth was a highly distributed IT environment with several datacenters, numerous systems and applications, and multiple networks. “When acquiring businesses, you inherit lots of old infrastructure and inevitably end up having to carry the investment of those assets,” observes Mark Wiltshire, IT Director at Kier Group.

Kier determined it needed to consolidate its sprawling on-premises IT environment to reduce costs and increase performance. The company had 10 datacenters predominantly running VMware, with servers hosting 80 percent virtualized workloads and 20 percent hardware-based workloads, which were nearing end of support. Kier consolidated all on-premises hardware into two colocation datacenters and a private cloud instantiation to counteract capacity issues it was experiencing and potential age-related hardware failures. 

From there, the company sought to harness the power of the cloud to take advantage of added scale, management, and innovation capabilities. “We knew that we wanted to use the public cloud and gain benefits like AI and enhanced data and security,” recalls Wiltshire. Kier selected Azure as its cloud platform because of its infrastructure as a service functionality and ease of integration with other solutions and services in Kier’s estate.

The company was already a Microsoft 365 customer with an investment in E5 licensing for security features across its applications and Azure environment. Kier worked closely with Azure engineers, a VMware Azure VMware Solution sales specialist and solution architect, and Claranet, a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to design, build, and implement its Azure VMware Solution migration. In collaboration with Microsoft, Kier’s internal architecture team designed its Azure landing zone with Claranet, who then went on to build and deliver the environment.

Kier also drew assistance from the Azure Migration and Modernization Program. “It helped us validate our business case, accelerate our cloud implementation with Claranet, and connect us with the solution expertise of the Azure engineering team, which supported the project with biweekly governance meetings,” recalls Wiltshire. “We completed the end-to-end migration of 640 servers and 135 applications to Azure VMware Solution in only three months, with a time to market of just one month. We seamlessly migrated 90 percent of our server workloads to Azure VMware Solution with minimal downtime and zero disruptions to the business.” 

With Azure VMware Solution, Kier was also able to migrate out of its datacenter environments and into the cloud easily, rapidly, and in a highly safe fashion without having to change applications or IP addresses. “As a large, mature organization, we couldn’t undertake a greenfield implementation, but we were able to quickly migrate and stand up our environment in the cloud with Azure VMware Solution,” Wiltshire says. 

The flexibility and functionality of the cloud

Kier can now pivot toward becoming fully cloud native while at the same time running VMware workloads as necessary for services that aren’t suited or cost-effective to run natively in the cloud. Having the freedom and flexibility to run some workloads in Azure VMware Solution and others in Azure enables the company to be more strategic in its IT provisioning. “Some of our existing applications are business critical,” says Wiltshire. “Having the ability to run these in Azure VMware Solution as long as needed makes sense from a cost approach.” Indeed, Kier is targeting a 25 percent reduction in costs over time with its new infrastructure. 

With most of its workloads now in the cloud, Kier is enjoying enhanced management capabilities. The company is using HashiCorp Terraform on Azure to deliver infrastructure as code to automate and simplify the management of its environment, and it plans to use Azure DevOps and GitHub for further automation and simplified management. Additionally, Kier strengthened its security posture with Azure. Azure VMware Solution interoperates with security products like Microsoft Defender and Azure Active Directory, and the company has deployed features like multifactor authentication and single sign-on. Kier is also in the process of moving to on-demand security information and event management, it’s currently implementing Microsoft Sentinel across all of its Microsoft environments, and it’s using Azure Site Recovery for its disaster recovery solution. 

What Kier is perhaps most enthusiastic about in its cloud deployment is no longer needing to implement cumbersome capacity management measures. Prior to its migration, increasing and decreasing capacity required serious planning and advanced capacity management. With Azure, however, Kier can add services as necessary. “We’re really seeing the benefits of the Azure platform’s full power,” says Wiltshire. “We can provision new nodes and services with the click of a button.”

Realizing transformational value

One key benefit Kier gained immediately after its migration to Azure VMware Solution was the ability to extend support for its legacy operating systems to ensure continued compliance, which, in turn, gave Kier more time to modernize its platforms and move workloads to Azure native. By migrating to Azure VMware Solution, the company was able to fortify those workloads with the extended support they required through Microsoft Extended Security Updates. “In our business, we have lots of contracts that stipulate cybersecurity requirements, and we have to ensure that our applications and servers are compliant to maintain accreditation,” says Wiltshire. “Our migration to Azure VMware Solution extended compliance to workloads approaching end of service because of Microsoft support."

But Kier is even more pleased about how Azure is empowering future innovation and growth. Despite the project’s initial scope of an infrastructure as a service migration, the company has already begun to realize other transformational Azure capabilities. Kier has since created a new data platform in Azure, and it plans to pursue more data, automation, analytics, and AI features and seize more development opportunities with tools like Power Apps.

“We’ve always seen Azure as an enabler of innovation, and after we’ve fully migrated our infrastructure and data to it, we can introduce DevSecOps, make data accessible, enhance interoperability and APIs, and add even more sophisticated features like AI and automation,” states Wiltshire. Where Kier previously had time and investment limitations when it came to scaling out its environment, this is no longer a blocker with Azure. “We have the agility to scale and meet business demands on an ongoing basis and can seize more opportunities for innovation,” he concludes.

Find out more about Kier on Twitter and LinkedIn.