ASAPCLOUD provides modern security, compliance for on-premises infrastructure with Azure Arc

Based in the heart of the Netherlands, ASAPCLOUD is a member of the Microsoft Partner Network that provides organizations in any sector with the professional IT services and support they need to stay efficient, keep innovation alive, and remain highly secure. Equipped with its growing range of services built on the latest Microsoft solutions, ASAPCLOUD can remotely monitor, manage, and greatly secure any customer’s infrastructure, whether that infrastructure is located in the cloud, on-premises, or a mix of both. 

In the Netherlands—like many other countries around the world—hiring IT professionals with the exact skills an organization needs can be challenging. This shortage of skilled workers is put in sharper relief by the recent rise in cyberthreats targeting every type of organization and infrastructure. To meet this challenge, ASAPCLOUD built new solutions that make use of Microsoft Azure Arc, which extends the Microsoft Azure control plane to resources across on-premises, multicloud, and edge locations. “We built solutions called ’We OPTIMISE your infrastructure‘ and ’We ANALYSE your infrastructure‘ natively in Azure,” says Dennis de Roo, Chief Technology Officer at ASAPCLOUD. “Through these products, which integrate with our customer management portal, we have created a unified management framework layer capable of monitoring, securing, and automating any organization’s infrastructure, regardless of its location.”

These new services sparked the interest of the municipality of Houten, ASAPCLOUD’s home city. Houten had recently lost two of its technology experts, and the municipality was beginning to run into compliance issues. With an aging on-premises infrastructure and low visibility into its own maintenance standards, Houten was a perfect candidate for ASAPCLOUD’s new Azure Arc–centered offerings. “There’s a lot of ransomware targeting governments in the Netherlands right now,” says Eric Surstedt, Team Leader for IT in the municipality of Houten. “We needed a cost-effective way to maintain a stable and highly secure on-premises environment through which we can confidently provide more than 200 necessary services to our citizens.”

The benefits of the cloud deliver visibility, insights to on-premises

An initial inspection of Houten’s regulatory compliance and security procedures showed just how dire the situation was for the municipality. Older operating systems and missed security patches resulted in a dramatic 25 percent compliance rate. “The first thing Azure Arc gave us was visibility,” says Surstedt. “Within a couple weeks, we gained a single pane of glass from which we can see, and ASAPCLOUD itself can monitor, our security landscape.”

With these new insights, ASAPCLOUD began to use its “We OPTIMISE your infrastructure” solution to heal the municipality’s ailing datacenters. “Since its implementation in Houten, the solution has increased compliance so much that today more than 90 percent of all available security controls are in place. We’ve gained a lot of self-assurance,” continues Surstedt. “We can see how secure we are now, and that’s built a lot of confidence.”

Though Houten’s datacenters remain on-premises, ASAPCLOUD’s implementation of Azure Arc and the Azure control plane as the central building block of its “We OPTIMISE your infrastructure” solution means that the municipality now has access to a number of security and monitoring layers that were previously out of reach. “Azure Arc is positioned centrally within our solutions so that we can grant them new levels of automation around security and configuration,” says De Roo. “Second only to Azure Arc in importance is Azure Monitor, which is our primary unified monitoring layer regarding IT infrastructure nodes and clusters.”

Azure Monitor helps organizations maximize the availability and performance of their applications and services. It offers a single hub from which companies can collect, analyze, and act on telemetry data from cloud and on-premises environments. Along with Azure Automation, which simplifies cloud management through automation of both configuration and routine tasks, and Azure Policy, which helps enforce organizational standards and assess compliance at scale, ASAPCLOUD relies on Azure Monitor to create a blueprint of each customer’s IT environment. This allows ASAPCLOUD to better tailor optimization to the needs of each customer. 

The importance of data security

For customers like the municipality of Houten, the simplification and automation of IT management means not only increased security and confidence, but an increased ability to focus on the services its citizens regularly depend on. “We provide so many services to our government and citizens,” says Surstedt. “Were these to go down, daily life in Houten would be disrupted.”  

During each phase of the development of its new offerings, ASAPCLOUD has been in regular contact with Microsoft. “We did a lot of research and work with Microsoft to ensure that we could embed Azure Arc and Azure Monitor within our solutions,” says De Roo. “Through that work, we’ve been able to provide customers with a modular service representative application, giving them a broad range of insights from across their infrastructure, and the ability to coordinate their services with Azure Arc, Azure Monitor, and Azure Automation.”

Recently, another municipality in the Netherlands served as a stark reminder of the importance of increased security. The victim of a ransomware attack, this municipality ultimately had to pay a sizeable fee to regain control of its systems. “People there couldn’t get passports, and they couldn’t renew driver’s licenses,” recalls Surstedt. “Thanks to ASAPCLOUD, we can see at a glance the kinds of threats we’ve faced. We can see what we’ve fended off, and we have experts at our side working to keep us safe.”

Facing the future with confidence

It isn’t just governmental entities in the Netherlands being targeted by new threats each day. Cyberthreats are a global phenomenon, and they show no sign of going away anytime soon. That’s why it’s so important that every organization, regardless of size, has access to a wide range of security tools and insights. “Here in the Netherlands, a number of municipalities are reluctant to move their workloads to the cloud,” says De Roo. “That’s what drove us to create a hybrid solution that grants on-premises infrastructure the security and compliance benefits of Azure without committing to a cloud migration.”

If, after a time, municipalities gain new levels of trust in the cloud—and if they feel comfortable making the move to Azure—ASAPCLOUD is ready and able to help in those efforts as well. “The inroads we’re making with cloud-averse customers would not be possible without Azure Arc,” says Lody Mustamu, Manager of Marketing and Sales at ASAPCLOUD. “When you see how Azure security and compliance features benefit your on-premises infrastructure, it helps put your mind at ease regarding the capabilities and benefits of the cloud. It also makes you a harder target for would-be attackers, and that’s what we’re hoping to achieve.”

ASAPCLOUD hopes that its work with the municipality of Houten can serve as an example for other municipalities that either lack the IT personnel to harden their own infrastructure against new threats or view migration to the cloud as a bridge too far. Beyond the increased security, compliance, and stability it has already gained, Houten is now beginning to show interest in migrating some workloads to Azure. “I don’t think we would have seen that sort of trust before we implemented ’We OPTIMISE your infrastructure’ with them,” says De Roo. “I’m hopeful that we’ll see other governmental organizations see them as a positive example on the months to come.”

Surstedt agrees. “I’d advise municipalities like ours not to try and go it alone when it comes to security— that’s impossible,” he says. “Every two weeks, we meet with the ASAPCLOUD team, and we go over the threats we’ve seen and how secure we are against those that we know are just around the corner. That process has kept us safe for two years now.” 

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