Services: Cloud, Digital Engineering Services
Client Overview
The client is the world’s largest producer of fresh, multi-berry crops, operating across complex, seasonal supply chains and serving global retail and food distribution channels. With over 1,200 staff across operations and seasonal roles, the client required a scalable, secure, and compliant cloud foundation to support its rapid growth and modernization roadmap.
The Challenge
The client, a global leader in agriculture and food distribution, faced critical infrastructure challenges stemming from a legacy data center hosted on Rackspace. As a business with significant seasonal variation and high operational complexity, their existing IT landscape lacked the flexibility and scalability needed to meet fluctuating demands, especially during peak harvest cycles that mobilized over 12,000 seasonal workers across regions.
The fragmented on-premise architecture not only limited responsiveness but also posed compliance risks due to limited visibility and disjointed identity management. Furthermore, their development, quality assurance, and production environments operated in silos, leading to inconsistencies in deployment, prolonged time-to-market for new features, and higher administrative overhead.
The absence of a unified governance model, modern security framework, and reliable disaster recovery further constrained scalability and compliance with mandates such as the Federal Information Security Management Act (FSMA) and the General data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Beyond infrastructure constraints, siloed development, QA, and production environments hindered agility, created inefficiencies, and left the organization exposed to system outages and audit risks. Recognizing these limitations, the client set out to build a digital core foundation that would not only enable current workloads—but power AI, analytics, and automation innovation for the future.
Sutherland Solution
Sutherland partnered with the client to architect and execute a holistic modernization roadmap powered by Microsoft Azure. The engagement began with the establishment of a robust Azure Landing Zone, grounded in the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework. This landing zone embedded enterprise-grade controls, enabling centralized policy enforcement, cost management, and role-based access governance.
The network architecture was strengthened with ExpressRoute, delivering secure, high-throughput connectivity for over 500 users, while identity and access were unified through Azure Active Directory with single sign-on capabilities.
The workload migration itself was executed in a phased manner, covering more than ten enterprise systems across ERP, HRMS, analytics, DevOps, and QA. This was not a simple lift-and-shift operation. Over 80% of legacy workloads were either containerized or re-engineered using Azure-native services, enhancing performance and portability. The team leveraged infrastructure-as-code and automation pipelines to streamline deployments, minimize manual interventions, and ensure consistency across environments.
Security was modernized by deploying Palo Alto’s Next-Generation Firewall and integrating logs into Azure Sentinel for real-time monitoring and analytics. Data protection was fortified with a tiered backup strategy using Veeam and Commvault, complemented by a cold-region disaster recovery setup leveraging Azure Blob storage.
The operations layer was transitioned into a 24×7 managed services model, with Sutherland providing end-to-end support across L1 to L3 tiers. This included automated patch management, backup enforcement, performance monitoring, and alert-driven incident resolution, all powered by AIOps frameworks and SOP-driven automation to ensure SLA adherence and continuous optimization.
The Outcome
The transformation delivered measurable and lasting value across operational, financial, and strategic dimensions. Infrastructure costs were reduced by approximately 28% over a three-year horizon, thanks to a combination of rationalized hardware, license optimization, and automation-driven efficiencies. The client’s ability to provision new environments and deploy applications improved by 40%, significantly accelerating their development cycles and enabling faster time-to-value.
Administrative overhead saw a 35% reduction due to centralized monitoring, scripted workflows, and reduced reliance on manual processes. Security operations were markedly enhanced, with a 50% improvement in mean time to detect and respond to incidents. This not only strengthened the organization’s resilience posture but also ensured compliance with critical industry standards such as FSMA, SOC2, and GDPR.
Resource utilization improved by 20%, enabled by intelligent scaling and cost-alerting mechanisms in Azure, allowing the IT team to align capacity more effectively with seasonal peaks and dynamic business requirements.
Most notably, the client fully exited their Rackspace data center, avoiding over $1 million in potential lease renewals. With a secure, scalable, and AI-ready cloud foundation in place, the client is now equipped to lead the next wave of agricultural innovation through AI-driven crop analytics, IoT-based field monitoring, and real-time supply chain intelligence.
KEY OUTCOMES
Reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) over 3 years through infra rationalization and automation
Faster development and deployment cycles
Decrease in administrative overhead
Improvement in incident response time
Increase in resource utilization efficiency
In on-prem lease renewal costs avoided by migrating Windows and MSSQL servers to Azure cloud
