COSMO CONSULT enters the cloud

The COSMO CONSULT Group will run its own corporate IT completely on Microsoft Azure based cloud services in the future. The company has converted its entire IT infrastructure with 31 connected locations in Europe and Latin America from a classic in-house model to on-demand services.

Greater speed, flexibility and data security will be achieved by using cloud-based internal business solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics, QlikView, Microsoft SharePoint and various development services. The company’s strong growth of recent years had led to major challenges in the deployment and operation of the IT systems, which constantly had to be expanded and updated. Since 2015, all employees of the COSMO CONSULT group have been using Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service. With the new flexibility of the cloud, it is possible to react more quickly and to optimize the use of resources. In the field of IT infrastructure it has already been possible to reduce costs by more than 30%. COSMO CONSULT will also reduce the amount of internal service and maintenance that has so far been caused by operating its own infrastructures.

"As a leading Microsoft Dynamics partner and globally active business software supplier, it was important to us not just to know the advantages of the new Microsoft cloud technologies in theory, but also to be a kind of first reference by putting them to use in practice," explained Uwe Bergmann, CEO of COSMO CONSULT AG. In the course of the company-wide cloud project, the core ERP functionality, the incoming invoice archiving system ExFlow, the business intelligence solution QlikView, the SharePoint platform and the CMS tool Typo3 for the COSMO CONSULT website were successively migrated to Microsoft Azure. "Our digital work space with Office 365 is now becoming integrated with the commercial business applications in the cloud. This allows all users to access the applications on mobile devices anywhere and anytime. As a company with distributed organizational structures and procedures this suits us well", said Uwe Bergmann.

"Following the successful migration from Exchange and Skype to Office 365, the next logical step was to move our applications to the cloud",  added Thomas Westers, Head of Global IT for COSMO CONSULT. "With Azure, we can now react more quickly and flexibly to system and organizational changes, and book additional resources with the push of a button, so to speak, as needed and, if they are no longer required, shut them down again. In addition to this, the native Azure services makes the otherwise often very complex task of setting up and networking of individual systems considerably simpler". The COSMO CONSULT-IT manager also pointed out another aspect, especially relevant for customers who are considering their own cloud deployment, "After concluding the contract and receiving the necessary agreements we were running the first applications within a week."

With its own Azure initiative, COSMO CONSULT also wants to demonstrate that the cloud can be more than just a new and cost-effective delivery model for IT systems. The cloud is also a pioneering technology for the concept of the digital enterprise, which does not only reproduce the traditional business processes with versatile business applications, but takes those processes to a new level through new possibilities for cooperation and intelligent business functionality. "For us, the move to Azure is a part of our own digital transformation", said Uwe Bergmann. "We are demonstrating the capabilities of the integrated Microsoft platform in our own company. All areas from sales and support to development and accounting are increasing the collective and collaborative productivity. "

The cloud is in: all the major providers of enterprise solutions today offer cloud infrastructure for their systems. Benefits such as rapid deployment, less effort required for internal administration, easy scalability and flexible leasing models mean that cloud services are increasingly in demand. With its Dynamics business management solutions, Microsoft is at the forefront of cloud technologies in the business field and relies on the Microsoft Cloud in Germany for data storage in data centers in the country. With T-Systems as data trustee Microsoft further strengthens data security. Because business applications are understood as services that can be used flexibly and independent of location, companies using them have not only a simpler and more flexible access to traditional business applications, but also access to completely new possibilities.