Fujitsu now scales in minutes, reduces upgrade costs with move to Azure

Building brand trust through innovation

Fujitsu helps its enterprise customers build lasting, sustainable change that drives business success. It connects people, ideas, expertise, and support capabilities with leading-edge technologies and innovations to provide clients with game-changing solutions that enable their business transformation.

Fujitsu adopted a new global business brand, called Fujitsu Uvance, in October 2021. The brand focuses on how Fujitsu helps its customers solve societal challenges, using its technological capabilities and problem-solving expertise to offer value while contributing to the company’s purpose: “Make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation.”

In launching this new business brand, Fujitsu knew it needed to revamp its online presence to better support its ambition. The company traditionally managed its online presence, called its global “One Internet Content Management System,” through dedicated hardware and on-premises datacenters. The online presence includes nearly 300,000 webpages, 600 gigabytes of content editor databases, 180 gigabytes of live content, and 1 terabyte of download content, and the online presence processes content in more than 20 languages. There are approximately 700 content editors in Fujitsu entities worldwide who work on the online presence, and more than 100 Fujitsu subsidiaries use the system.

Since the online presence is a business-critical system, Fujitsu needs it to have continual uptime, even as the company makes daily updates to it. The software release used in its on-premises datacenters was near the end of its life, which Fujitsu turned into an opportunity to make a change.

“Fujitsu had recently adopted a cloud-first strategy, so we decided to migrate our online presence to the cloud as one of our pilot projects in this new approach,” says Christian Walter, Head of Web and Collaboration at Fujitsu. “It is an ambitious effort to prove that business-critical systems with high quality and high availabilities can lift up to the cloud and prove the additional benefits of the cloud.” The company was eager to find a cloud solution that would position it for continued cloud innovation in alignment with its new global business brand.

After comparing Azure and other hyperscale cloud providers, Fujitsu selected Azure to continue building on the initial Azure training its team already had. Fujitsu found Azure High Priority to be highly valuable as it began migrating, too, and it had regular stand-up calls with the Microsoft team to ensure everything ran smoothly. Azure High Priority support is only available for approved highly strategic customers, and Fujitsu used Azure High Priority support with a direct line to pre-informed engineers who know the Fujitsu environment.

Selecting Azure additionally keeps Fujitsu in sync with its customer needs. “We offer many Microsoft-related services for our customers. Using Azure is a big benefit to us, because it gives us an even deeper firsthand understanding of the solution when we talk about it with customers,” says Mika Hyppönen, Alliance Director, Microsoft EMEIA, Global Strategic Alliances at Fujitsu.

More scalability, flexibility, and efficiency

Fujitsu brings together the power of several key Azure technologies to enhance its implementation, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) on Azure to continue innovating with scalable cloud services. “By migrating to Azure, we have more scalability, flexibility, and efficiency, along with reduced upgrade-related costs for our online presence, than when we kept it in on-premises datacenters,” Walter says.

Fujitsu can easily and cost-effectively scale performance as traffic and demands change by using Azure Cache for Redis and Azure Storage, so its critical online presence is always performing well for customers.

“Scalability is one of the key advantages of moving our online presence to Azure. Before the migration, scaling required many manual, repetitive tasks,” Walter explains. “Scaling in the on-premises datacenter for large updates to our online presence could take days. Now that our online presence is on Azure, we can scale in a matter of minutes.”

Fujitsu also uses Azure DevOps to easily set up automated pipelines to build, test, and deploy code. “With Azure DevOps, we can do parallel development, which makes us faster and more flexible in updating our online presence,” Walter says. “This benefits our customers, since we can more easily and quickly provide them with the most up-to-date information.”

With Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Fujitsu can develop, deploy, and scale cloud-native apps, including microservices, for its online presence. “Using Azure Kubernetes Service, we can deploy a microservice to one Kubernetes service and scale it, and it does not influence the other Kubernetes services because they are isolated. This gives us more ease of mind about deploying, since we can avoid any unintended changes,” Walter says.

Continued innovation 

Ultimately, improving the scalability, flexibility, and efficiency of its online presence means that Fujitsu can continue innovating to better serve its customers. “Migrating our online presence to Azure makes it easier to engage with customers and the market much more seamlessly,” Walter says. “We can act more quickly on customer needs by being more data-driven. We can view the health of our system with Azure Monitoring and the security status of our system with Microsoft Defender for Cloud. This allows us to implement data-driven system operation management without additional efforts to gather and analyze information."

The migration to Azure was a successful pilot for Fujitsu of its cloud-first strategy and highlights the opportunities ahead. “The migration proved how capable Azure is and how many amazing possibilities it opens up to continue innovating and improving our services,” Walter emphasizes. “This has shown that the cloud-native approach is the right path forward.”

This is just the beginning for Fujitsu, Hyppönen adds. “We plan to continue exploring the benefits of more Azure services and how we can use the cloud to advance our business goals,” Hyppönen says. “We are excited to continue realizing the many amazing possibilities of Azure.”

Find out more about Fujitsu on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.