Cloud for business: flexibility and adaptability

Konstantin Koval, Director of the IT Infrastructure Expertise Center Metinvest Digital spoke about the effective management of large-scale IT infrastructure during the online event Microsoft - Ukraine Manufacturing Day. Yes, Metinvest Digital, as an IT partner, is responsible for the entire IT landscape of the Metinvest Group. These are 874 IT systems, 1525 servers and 2,000 TB of data at all Group companies in Ukraine, Europe and the USA.

The main theses from his speech:

— Effective management of a large-scale IT infrastructure requires a clear strategy and careful planning, because the reliability of the IT infrastructure is the smooth operation of technological and business processes.

— The market and the competitive environment dictate new increased requirements for flexibility and adaptability of the IT infrastructure.

— Today, technology is changing so fast that capital investment in On-premise, unlike the cloud, is becoming a burden on business and slowing down operational change.

— Metinvest Digital chose the Cloud first approach because cloud technologies provide businesses with new opportunities, namely to adapt faster to change and more effectively implement innovative solutions of Industry 4.0.

— This year, we moved 680 servers from two central data centers to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Of these, 85 terminal servers were transformed into the PaaS (Platform as a Service) format of Windows Virtual Desktop for 2,000 users, which was the first implementation of such a large-scale solution in Ukraine.

— We already have the ability to quickly increase the capacity to deploy new solutions and use cloud computing.

— The next step in our Cloud strategy is to build a hybrid cloud environment, namely the development of Hybrid Cloud (Intelligent Cloud + Intelligent Edge).