Jef De Wolf, CIO of Group De Wolf: "The day you hope he will never come came along, and a spontaneous server crash shook our organisation. Suddenly we were faced with thousands of pallets, the destination of which was unknown. That is stress, and this crash revealed that our former on-premise infrastructure needed to be renewed, and we suddenly realised how dependent we were on ICT. It was at that critical moment that VanRoey.be got into the breach, and we were quickly and efficiently helped by the engineers who came to the scene and who helped us.

To Cloud or Not To Cloud?

Together with Tony Verhaegen, specialist at VanRoey.be, we made the comparison: does an on-premise environment with its own infrastructure offer enough advantages compared to a migration to the Cloud? For Jef, it was more a question of focus; "Do we want to continue to take all the risks involved into account for our own account? Or do we buy peace of mind and put these tasks in the hands of people and companies who do nothing else? In the end, we're not an ICT company and we can put our energy into our core business.

"For these reasons, we finally opted for the solution that VanRoey.be presented to us. On the one hand, we migrated existing physical and virtual servers to the cloud, in the Microsoft Azure platform. On the other hand, we called in Office 365 and Exchange Online for standard office work, with local Office installations and Skype For Business."

Tony Verhaegen, Cloud and Licensing Solutions Specialist at VanRoey.be: "In the long run, the Cloud or a hybrid environment almost always comes out better than just on-premises, for a number of reasons: in addition to the peace of mind that Jef talked about, you will also receive a clear invoice with which you know exactly how much you are paying for the leased infrastructure, because if you're not mistaken, in addition to the hardware and maintenance costs, there are also a lot of hidden costs involved in owning your own server park, for example, the high energy consumption costs of both equipment and cooling, the need to provide an enclosed space and the need to provide an enclosed space.

Cloud Service Provider

Jef: "I think it's a great advantage that when we reach the limits of servers - in terms of storage, computing power or ram memory - we can make more capacity available with just a few mouse clicks and without any technical knowledge. No more migration processes, downtime, errors during installation, waiting for new rams or hard disks... Breakdowns are virtually non-existent, we use the servers optimally and only pay for what we use.

As a Microsoft 'Cloud Service Provider' (CSP), VanRoey.be Group can directly grant De Wolf new Office licenses and simply deactivate unused licenses without the intervention of Microsoft, which makes a huge difference in terms of flexibility and in the invoice"; "That's right, when a new employee starts tomorrow or a colleague leaves, a signal to Tony is enough, the times of buying unused office licenses 'just in case' are fortunately over", Jef adds.