Grupo IFM keeps pace with the fast-moving IT services industry with IBM Cloud

Increasingly, as businesses seek to drive digital transformation, they are looking to outsource the lower levels of IT management to specialist providers.
At Grupo IFM, we provide corporate services, including IT services, to our member companies. This includes helping them unify their information systems to optimize costs and resources. To deliver value, we constantly need to create new, better offerings. So it’s not just our group companies who need to focus on innovation; as a service provider, we need to innovate too.
Breaking the shackles of legacy systems
Innovation is difficult when legacy technology gets in the way. Over the years, we had built a highly customized, on-premises server infrastructure which we used to run many of our member companies’ core enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. It was complex to manage and too reliant on the specialist skills of a few employees.
We wanted to find a way to spend less time managing the infrastructure so that we could free up our IT team to focus on higher-value projects instead.
Finding freedom in the cloud
On the recommendation of one of our suppliers, we engaged S&M Cloud to help us transform our infrastructure. S&M Cloud showed us how we could harness IBM Cloud technology to replace our legacy on-premises servers and storage.
The IBM Cloud offered us a level of reliability, efficiency, scalability and manageability that we just didn’t see from other vendors. Above all, we were impressed with the quality of service that the IBM team provides. They’re very professional and proactive, and they take care of everything.
We now run our systems to IBM Cloud bare metal servers, which provide the performance we need to run a virtual server environment that supports our ERP applications. We are also using IBM Cloud Object Storage System as a reliable, cost-effective solution for storing backups.
Zero disruption for business users
Working with S&M Cloud and IBM, the implementation was seamless. In fact, our users didn’t even notice that anything had changed.
We were initially nervous about connecting to a remote server in the cloud instead of having everything on our local network, but in reality, there has been no impact on performance or reliability. Everything just works.
Throughout the whole project, we only had one technical issue, and the IBM team was able to fix it in less than two hours. The environment is critical for our business, so having that level of service is extremely important.
Saving cost, reducing risk
With the new IBM Cloud solution in place, Grupo IFM has achieved its two main goals.
First, we have minimized risk by replacing a complex, hard-to-maintain infrastructure with a modern, flexible environment that is easy to manage. We are much less reliant on the specialist skills of key individuals. Instead, we can depend on the whole IBM support organization to keep our systems healthy.
Second, by outsourcing the infrastructure management to IBM, we have significantly reduced the workload of our IT team. This gives us about 10 percent more time to spend on higher-level, higher-value tasks.
Ultimately, the IBM Cloud solution helps us make better use of our resources to help our member companies innovate. That means we can become more than an IT service provider. We can be a true partner in the whole group’s digital transformation.
Read the case study for more details.
The post Grupo IFM keeps pace with the fast-moving IT services industry with IBM Cloud appeared first on Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud