Aurobay rebuilds its entire IT environment in less than two years with Azure

After splitting from its parent company, powertrain solution supplier Aurobay had to rebuild its entire IT environment. It needed to keep some on-premises workloads and applications, but it still wanted to modernize and be cloud native where possible. The company adopted a hybrid cloud strategy using Microsoft Azure and solutions like Microsoft Entra ID, Azure Arc, and Intune to streamline and enhance management of its infrastructure and empower application teams to run cost efficiently on their own. With more than 70 percent of its deployment complete in a year and a half, Aurobay can set up new applications and put in group policies much faster than on-premises while expanding to include Azure AI services and Azure Machine Learning.

“The people who start working with us now will never know the old on-premises world, so our Azure deployment makes a huge difference in their ability to run environments by themselves in the most cost-efficient way.”

Sofia Hagberg, Head of Digital Platforms and Data Innovation, Aurobay

Aurobay and Azure—the fuel that ignited rapid transformation

In early 2021, Aurobay split from its former parent company, Volvo Cars, and joined Geely Holdings. The structural and strategic change forced Aurobay to build a new IT environment from scratch in little time and outside the comfort of a much bigger and more established IT organization. It needed to keep the lights on in its existing factory and simultaneously strategize how to modernize all areas of the company. “Our main business isn’t to create new datacenters,” says Carol Wittgren, Head of Digital Acceleration at Aurobay. That understanding, combined with a depth of background knowledge about Microsoft, led Wittgren and Aurobay’s IT team to the innovative, data-driven, and managed capabilities of Microsoft Azure. “We want to deliver cloud infrastructure and services to the organization while also keeping security, identity, networking—and most importantly, cost—under control.”

To maintain business continuity, the company requires some workloads and applications, including those that steer robots on the factory floor, to be hosted on-premises. This made Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) and Azure Arc ideal solutions. Azure Arc serves as a bridge, extending the Azure platform so that customers can build applications and services with the flexibility to run across datacenters, at the edge, and in multicloud environments. “When we began the carve out, we basically started from scratch apart from the applications that were still on-premises, especially factory-related and latency-sensitive applications,” says Wittgren. “We’ve begun to invest in setting up Azure Arc so that we can orchestrate both Azure cloud consumption and services and on-premises workloads together and do everything as similarly as possible.” Adds Bartłomiej Jasiewicz, Product Owner for Worklife Experience at Aurobay, “By adopting Microsoft Entra ID, we ensure a seamless and efficient experience for our workforce, enabling them to access resources and collaborate effortlessly in the cloud while we deliver enhanced productivity in a cutting-edge environment for their daily work.”

The company set out to migrate 550 on-premises applications to Azure as is, making some entirely Azure native and transforming the rest along the way using RISE with SAP on Azure, which connects to the Aurobay Azure environment via Azure ExpressRoute. Its integration platform resides on Azure and Teamcenter, a Siemens solution for product lifecycle management, hosted on Azure. New efficiencies gained from Azure are bringing Aurobay significantly closer to completing its carve out and accomplishing its modernization goals with reduced time to development and faster results, all at less cost.

“Comparing what it would have cost to build the same type of datacenter and support teams ourselves, using Azure and all the services it offers is much more efficient and seamless,” says Wittgren. “Where we now have 5 to 10 cloud engineers and architects working on the infrastructure, we might have needed 30 to 40 managing the same type of workloads in an on-premises environment, which is a huge benefit from an operational perspective.”

Unlocking new Azure features, scaling skill sets, and democratizing data architecture

Aurobay’s on-premises infrastructure included Active Directory for identity and access management, along with Windows servers, Linux servers running a mix of Red Hat and SUSE, and Oracle clusters running OpenVMS. Constructing its hybrid infrastructure over the years, Aurobay has built a network around on-premises Active Directory and cloud-based Microsoft Entra ID with Azure ExpressRoute and enterprise-enrolled Azure landing zones. This helped it begin to tap into a wide range of scalable, flexible, highly secure, and cost-effective features to better manage its applications and services. As part of this, Aurobay has taken advantage of a combination of Windows Server and Linux operating systems using Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Kubernetes Service to run applications. “There’s definitely room for improvement for us moving forward when it comes to containerization and Kubernetes resources,” says Wittgren. “That will be a part of the transformation of applications when they’ve been fully migrated from on-premises.”

When it first decided to modernize with Azure, Aurobay was attracted to the ease of scale, orchestration, and maintenance around the entire environment, along with the ability to condense existing infrastructure, scale on a single platform, and do more with less. “We’re using Microsoft for so much more than we initially planned,” says Sofia Hagberg, Head of Digital Platforms and Data Innovation at Aurobay. “Having one large supplier that can help us with so many different parts has been extremely positive.” Adds Wittgren, “A specialist team from Microsoft helped us set up the full Azure tenant with all the landing zones, subscriptions, and group policies, which was critical in getting this right from the start.”

As part of the carve out, Aurobay also had to take on a large data migration, moving 200 terabytes of information from its on-premises environment with Volvo Cars to its standalone Aurobay environment in Azure using Azure Data Box. “We’ve transferred terabytes of files, now protected by Azure Information Protection, by organizing, splitting, and relabeling objects stored in SharePoint and file shares,” says Michal Filipek, Lead Engineer for Microsoft 365 and Cloud at Aurobay. “We devised a unique automated process to expedite label rewrites without disrupting users.”

Following the initial migration, the company adopted additional capabilities like Microsoft Intune for mobile device management, working with Microsoft Entra ID for computer and mobile device provisioning and imaging. “We discarded old practices, transitioning Aurobay to modern device management by connecting all user platforms—including Android and iOS mobile devices and Windows 10 and Windows 11 endpoints—with Azure and Intune,” says Filipek. “We implemented cross-platform policies for configuration, compliance, and protection, maintaining security without affecting user experience.

Aurobay’s application and management teams are gradually being exposed to the benefits of Azure so that Aurobay’s IT team can help them use the cloud platform to the best of their ability. “This is a manufacturing factory, so people want to see their servers, touch them, go into a room and hear them, but we’re able to show those servers are safe in the cloud,” says Hagberg. “We can easily spin up resources in Azure and share what they’ll look like, and I think it’s very good for engineers to get to a point where they can take this over and run it by themselves.” Adds Wittgren, “Automation has also been key with us using infrastructure as code in most of these areas, and we’re scaling skill sets within the company through Microsoft trainings, certifications, and supporting applications teams to know what Azure tools to use and where.”

In addition to meeting its goals of democratizing teams and delivering infrastructure on demand, Aurobay can now optimize its Azure environment and enable employees to dedicate more time to value-added opportunities. “With our policy-driven architecture, we can put in group policies and security aspects from the start so that we don’t have to redo everything when we set up new servers or virtual machines,” says Wittgren. “Moving forward, we’re looking at serverless architecture because it removes the burden of managing servers, operating systems, and runtime environments.”

These time-saving measures have contributed to the speed of Aurobay’s hybrid cloud rollout, driving the company closer to its modernization goals. “We’ve done 70 to 80 percent of the carve out, but we still have some heavy things to migrate before we can focus solely on modernization and look more at serverless architecture alongside native-cloud and data-driven development,” says Wittgren. “Developers will be able to focus solely on writing code without worrying about infrastructure management, deployment, or scaling.”

Propelling forward with cloud modernization and next-level capabilities

Since adopting Azure, Aurobay’s IT team has accomplished an entire environment rebuild in the cloud—despite having a small team and an accelerated timeline. “With the cost and operational benefits we now have, we can do a lot with a small team and build a hybrid platform for all of the cloud services across the company that we don’t need to manually operate,” says Jens Christensen, Lead Engineer for Azure Cloud at Aurobay.

With new software and architecture leadership in place, Aurobay is continuously embracing new methods of data modeling and management to maximize its data, taking its capabilities to the next level with Azure AI services, Azure Machine Learning, and Azure high-performance computing. “Having our Azure deployment in place, we can scale it or merge it with something else as needed,” says Hagberg. “This is extremely helpful for the future because our company is quite small, so we’re constantly simplifying and setting things up quicker and more easily than we could have in an old-fashioned datacenter.” Adds Wittgren, “Migrating what we have in a year and a half is quite fast, going from where we were to where we are now and having a fully functional infrastructure and the services surrounding it.”

To validate its progress, Aurobay recently set up an on-premises application and found that doing the same type of activity in Azure using Azure database services and backups was much more efficient than it had ever been on-premises. “The people who start working with us now will never know the old on-premises world, so our Azure deployment makes a huge difference in their ability to run environments by themselves in the most cost-efficient way,” says Hagberg. Adds Wittgren, “This provides us with the added advantage of attracting the highest skilled employees as we use the newest technologies available.”

Find out more about Aurobay on LinkedIn.

“We’ve begun to invest in setting up Azure Arc so that we can orchestrate both Azure cloud consumption and services and on-premises workloads together and do everything as similarly as possible.”

Carol Wittgren, Head of Digital Acceleration, Aurobay