This article was originally written by Avanade alum Louis Ampe.

Let’s talk about cloud migration and transformation.

It’s a topic countless organizations have explored over the past few years, especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when companies around the world looked for ways to unlock remote working and free themselves from the costs and restrictions of on-premises infrastructure. Those that had already migrated to the cloud benefitted from increased business continuity during the crisis.

While you may think that a cloud migration is a standardized solution, it’s quite different for everyone – every organization has its own objectives. Moving to the cloud is an evolving experience journey, personalized to match the needs, goals and vision of each company embarking on its own path. And as the most experienced Microsoft Azure cloud services partner in the industry, it’s something we live and breathe every day as we help our clients rethink what it means to be agile and resilient while putting people – both customers and employees – first.

Cooking up a cloud strategy
I’ve written previously about Avanade’s Manage & Evolve engagement with Vandemoortele, a Belgium-based food producer, and how our managed services partnership was the jumping off point for further innovation and a much wider transformation, including a more involved migration to the Microsoft Azure cloud. Right from the start of our partnership, it was clear that our visions were aligned. Singularly focused on providing the best products and services to its customers, Vandemoortele never stops refining, improving and innovating. If you know Avanade, that should sound familiar.

The company understood the power of Azure and had already begun building a hybrid cloud environment, with some applications operating in the cloud and others still using on-premises infrastructure. Vandemoortele also knew that moving more apps and tools to the cloud would help lower costs while creating more scalable, agile and automated operations. This would free up more time for employees to focus on the important work of serving customers and dreaming up the next tasty treat.

“We believe that empowered employees equal happier customers,” says Benoît Dewaele, Vandemoortele’s CIO. “We knew that shifting a lot more of our applications onto the Azure cloud with Avanade would enable that and unlock new opportunities for further improving our customer experiences.”

Hybrid environment? No problem
Here at Avanade, we use a tailored approach to embark on a cloud migration at scale, moving multiple applications and workloads to the Azure public cloud while maintaining links to the legacy systems that remain on premises. One of the keys to successfully managing this type of blended environment is our use of Azure Arc, which extends Azure management and services across all types of infrastructure, whether on-premises, in the cloud, hybrid cloud or at the edge.

But the real value comes when we help our clients deploy Azure PaaS services, allowing them to spin up new applications quickly on their existing Azure infrastructure. This is where the “evolve” part of our Manage & Evolve offering really shines, and this is how we unlock the cool modernization features that Azure enables. Vandemoortele uses technical Azure services like Azure Backup to SQL.

Focusing on what’s important
Faced with unprecedented challenges and uncertainty, Vandemoortele is armed with new insights and is looking ahead to how the cloud will help it extend its brand into new areas and bring its products to more customers. Now, the company can spend more time thinking about food innovation and less time worrying about the technology supporting it. Like developing a new product, all the ingredients are coming together to create something special.

It's important to remember that cloud is about the journey of modernization, not just the destination. So, what will your cloud journey look like?

Check out the Vandemoortele client story page for more.