Home Trust increases performance, reduces time to market with Azure VMware Solution

Trusting the potential of Azure

As a provider of financial products ranging from mortgages, credit cards, and deposits, Home Trust relies on highly responsive and resilient computing capacity and processing power to deliver its services. When the company’s servers in the colocation datacenter reached their end of life, Home Trust moved to a cloud-hosted solution and later found that continually upgrading VMware would be costly and resource-intensive.

Home Trust wanted to rely less on time-consuming hardware and software upgrades and more on a managed service that would provide necessary VMware updates and patches as they were released. This would also serve as a key business differentiator for the company. Home Trust chose Azure VMware Solution—an especially attractive solution given its existing Azure investments and network connections, along with significant ease of management, seamless scalability, and cost savings.

Working with Microsoft and implementation partner Bell Canada, Home Trust accelerated its transformation plans, and in less than half a year, it exited the existing cloud-hosted solution and moved more than 750 virtual machines (VMs)—split between running Windows Server and SUSE Linux—to run on Azure infrastructure with Azure VMware Solution. “When it suddenly became a very large investment for us to keep our VMware environment current, we switched to Azure VMware Solution to let Microsoft take care of management with much larger scale than we have at Home Trust,” says Doug Caldwell, Vice President of IT Infrastructure at Home Trust Company. “With Azure VMware Solution, we now have the advantage of Microsoft’s VMware expertise, scalability, and management of everything from patching to versions.”

This move is part of the company’s wider digital transformation from older to modern systems. “A lot of our business agility comes from this digital transformation project,” notes Caldwell. “What really differentiates Home Trust from other financial institutions is the business application layer itself. And after migrating to Azure VMware Solution, we no longer focus on the ‘plumbing’ but rather on the business and the applications that deliver business value.”

Improving performance, availability, and security

When Home Trust began migrating to the Azure cloud platform in 2019, it sought reliability, resilience, and reduced operating costs. As anticipated, its adoption of Azure VMware Solution brought additional enhancements, including a new generation of servers, disks, and processors. Having Microsoft handle management also improved platform availability. As Caldwell describes, “If I had three nodes with my previous cloud-hosted provider, I needed to make sure there was a fourth one in case one failed. Now, if I have three nodes, Microsoft helps ensure that a spare is available, and it manages the swap. I’m relieved of managing hardware and redundancy entirely.”

Home Trust appreciates the confidence and fast disaster recovery capabilities it’s gained through its migration to Azure, including System and Organization Controls (SOC) for Service Organizations compliance reports and using local Azure regions in Canada Central (Ontario) and Canada East (Quebec) as its primary and secondary datacenter locations.

A better, faster, and less expensive approach

Rapidly migrating from on-premises to Azure, Home Trust prioritized getting business-critical applications up and running, including those from SAP and OpenText. Next, it shifted to stabilizing the business and increasing its application user base. Outside of Azure VMware Solution, Home Trust has deployed from 40 to 50 different Microsoft products, including Azure Databricks and Power BI, which it uses to deliver data-rich reports to help make more informed decisions around spending and resource optimization. Its VMware storage is extended using Azure NetApp Files.

Working in Azure and having managed infrastructure has freed Home Trust’s IT team to future-proof and expand the business in new, innovative ways, including taking advantage of more Azure software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings. “Now that we’re all in on Azure, we can look at a workload and modernize and optimize it by moving it to Azure SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS,” says Caldwell.

As for cost optimization in the cloud, Home Trust tapped into Azure Hybrid Benefit to migrate existing licenses to Azure and Microsoft Cost Management to further optimize its investments with confidence. “It’s a great time to be working in a cloud environment where Microsoft as a technology leader continues to invest heavily in technology, security, scalability, reliability, cost optimization, and all the areas that keep us running smoothly,” he says.

Closing skills gaps with support from Microsoft and Bell Canada

Home Trust enlisted support from Azure Migrate and Modernize teams to get ahead of project deadlines. A dozen Microsoft enterprise account team members work with the company weekly on initiatives such as rightsizing VMs to further minimize costs. Together, they run profilers, examine workloads, and identify good candidates to move through IaaS or PaaS or to rightsize.

Bell Canada, Home Trust’s external solution partner, was also highly involved in design and implementation and brought in specialized support from other technology vendors. “We’ve collaborated with Home Trust on other services, so Bell was a natural fit for the Azure VMware Solution project because we understood their needs,” says Christian Dumas, National Director of Professional Services at Bell Canada. “Our Bell cloud migration professional services experts designed and implemented a comprehensive project plan that included the consolidation and migration of Home Trust’s VMware workloads to Azure VMware Solution, while ensuring that it met client-specific requirements.” Adds Caldwell, “We gained considerable peace of mind knowing we weren’t doing this by ourselves, and the mutual respect, common goals, and senior management commitment from Bell Canada were very important in a project like this.”

For Home Trust, having the joint support of Microsoft and Bell Canada significantly streamlined migration efforts and helped maximize success. It was impressed with their joint capabilities, commitment, and responsiveness throughout the entire engagement, and the agile delivery approach is what helped bring the project over the finish line. “With the experience and deep technical support from Microsoft, Bell, NetApp, and everyone else involved, this was a remarkable accomplishment, underscored by the fact that we’re not a large company,” says Caldwell.

“An exciting time for everyone in the business”

Home Trust IT and business teams alike enjoy having access to modern technologies and on-demand scalability in a dynamic Azure environment. Most of all, they appreciate that Azure VMware Solution is a managed service by Microsoft with redundancy and scalability built in. Says Caldwell, “We’ve been able to serve the Canadian market running on Azure without any limitations, delivering products to market faster than it would have taken on our pre-2019 platform.”

The company has an Azure-first mindset when it comes to new deployments and workloads. In fact, Home Trust asks all potential new solution providers if their applications and services run on Azure. “We’ve become 100 percent based in Azure in three and a half years, gaining a modern technology footprint and performance improvements using Azure VMware Solution and a modern application stack,” concludes Caldwell. “Buying a big server and sticking it in a datacenter doesn’t make sense for us anymore. We have incredible opportunities ahead as we move at an accelerated pace with Azure. It’s an exciting time for everyone in the business.”

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