The challenge
A global automotive manufacturer was running engineering, supply chain and dealer-facing applications across a mix of ageing on-premises data centres and early, loosely governed cloud deployments. Each region had evolved its own way of working, so the estate was expensive to run, hard to secure consistently and slow to respond when the business needed to scale.
The leadership team was facing several pressing issues:
- Inconsistent security controls and patching standards between regions
- Weeks of lead time to provision new environments for engineering teams
- Limited visibility of cloud spend, utilisation and ownership
- Core infrastructure approaching end of support, with rising maintenance costs
Our approach
We started with a structured discovery of the application portfolio, mapping dependencies, data residency requirements and business criticality. This gave the client a clear, prioritised view of what to migrate, what to modernise and what to retire.
From there, we designed and delivered a secure, multi-region cloud foundation:
- A standardised landing zone with consistent network, identity and security guardrails applied in every region
- Infrastructure as code so environments could be created, reviewed and repeated reliably, rather than built by hand
- Wave-based migration planned around production schedules, with rehearsed cut-overs and clear rollback plans to protect manufacturing operations
- FinOps practices including tagging standards, rightsizing and reserved capacity planning, giving each business unit ownership of its costs
- Centralised monitoring and logging to give operations and security teams a single view of the estate
Throughout the programme we worked alongside the client’s own engineers, sharing knowledge and documenting patterns so the new platform would be sustainable long after go-live. Once migration was complete, F10 took on day-to-day platform operations through our managed services team.
The outcome
The manufacturer now runs its critical workloads on a consistent, secure and well-governed cloud platform that scales with demand across every region.
- Infrastructure costs fell by around 40% through rightsizing, automation and the retirement of legacy hardware
- Business-critical services consistently meet a 99.95% availability target
- Engineering teams can provision compliant environments three times faster than before
- Security policies are applied uniformly, simplifying audits and reducing risk
With the foundations in place, the client is now exploring data and AI initiatives that build directly on the new platform.
