Premier U.S. Mountain Resort Modernizes
On-Premises Environment with Microsoft Azure

Challenge:

A premier U.S. mountain resort, with multiple locations and 35,000+ corporate and seasonal employees, needed to modernize its on-premises environment by building and migrating to a cloud solution, and enabling automation to meet security and compliance requirements.

The customer’s digital transformation began by creating a Data Sciences team to analyze business data utilizing a data warehouse platform and Azure subscriptions with resources to deploy and use Kubernetes containers with Terraform automation. They quickly encountered several challenges, including:

• Inability and lack of expertise using Terraform to meet compliance requirements.
• Ensuring the Data Sciences environment could automatically be deployed consistently and securely.
• Properly and securely setting up their landing zone and supporting ongoing management of the environment.
• Separating duties between developers and operations.
• Needing help going from development to production.
• Inability to provide maximum security around cloud resources.

Solution:

SHI was brought on to help meet their security and compliance requirements using Terraform. Leveraging this tool would allow the customer to run their environment in a cost-effective, secure and efficient manner.

By performing an in-depth technical analysis, SHI uncovered existing security gaps and provided the following security recommendations: 

• Utilizing Azure security center, SHI drew a security baseline to update the customer’s infrastructure and application in the cloud, increasing their security score.
• SHI implemented Azure defenders on all available supported resources for an additional layer of security.
• Using Microsoft Azure’s Logic App workflow SOAR and automation runbook, SHI provided a real-time response to Azure security center alerts.

To manage their data center infrastructure, SHI built Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and used Terraform to codify cloud resource APIs into declarative configuration files to build, manage, and orchestrate infrastructures in the Azure public cloud – eliminating the possibility of human error.

SHI imported existing Azure resources and deployed new resources into a stateful configuration, allowing the customer to manage the lifecycle of those resources until they are deprovisioned.

In addition, SHI provided version control and automation deployment using Azure DevOps to improve and accelerate resource deployment between the customer’s development and production environments.

SHI also implemented Azure backup and disaster recovery solutions leveraging Azure recovery services vault to achieve high availability and a resilient environment for business continuity. The solution kept recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives within organizational limits.

Benefits/Results:

The new solution and environment allowed the customer to focus on their digital transformation journey and offered several benefits, including:

• Cloud adoption and knowledge transfer on ways to articulate road maps with cloud solutions.
• High availability, scalability and cloud solution business continuity.
• Creating infrastructure in Azure public cloud over multiple environments.
• Quickly provision several infrastructures with minimal effort.
• Seamlessly launch applications, reducing time for provisioning underlying infrastructures.
• Manage lifecycle of cloud infrastructure as code.
• Full cloud solution automation.