How Canderel, one of Canada’s largest real estate companies, successfully leveraged the Hypertec Cloud platform to ensure business continuity.
“Canderel’s success in Canada lies in its ability to leverage partners, vendors, and other entities that are considered an extension of the Canderel family.” Those are the words of Lance Leblanc, Vice-President, Technology and Digital Transformation at Canderel, and they sum up the essence of their experience choosing Hypertec Cloud as their infrastructure provider and CloudOps as their managed services partner to ensure a secure and efficient transition to the cloud.
Lance Leblanc graciously accepted to tell the story of how Canderel successfully transitioned to cloud services working together with Hypertec Cloud and CloudOps (Aptum) in our latest webinar The SME GUIDE TO CLOUD featuring Mike Gero, VP Operations at Hypertec Cloud, Ian Rae, CEO of CloudOps, and hosted by David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte.
Here are the 3 takeaways from this conversation that should resonate with any growth mindset company with similar goals looking to utilize the efficiencies of a regional cloud in a flexible and secure environment.
1. Understand your business needs
When planning a transition to the cloud, companies can encounter a mix of challenges and ensuing business needs such as:
- Creating synergies within the organization but also with customers.
- Finding the resources to run an on-prem environment efficiently with a shared network, common toolset, and centralized services.
- Ensuring business continuity and mitigating the impact of external factors (e.g., natural disasters).
- Managing the lifecycle of hardware amidst unpredictable growth scenarios or data needs.
For Canderel, delivering efficiencies back to the organisation and developing business continuity strategies were the main requirements from using cloud services. However, it was not an easy feat because their legacy applications were a dependency that restrained them from taking full advantage of cloud computing benefits. After spending time internally identifying their needs and onboarding trusted partners (CloudOps and Hypertec Cloud), they turned this challenge into a critical success factor to keep the business going.
2. Challenge your partners before choosing them
“It’s not just a one-way relationship. Your partner must be willing to do a deep dive, to navigate complexity, and have the difficult conversations to ensure they completely understand your business needs, roadmap, and vision […]” Lance Leblanc. This is exactly what Canderel did with Hypertec Cloud, challenging, questioning, and leveraging the team’s ability to provide value to the project, and it was once this process was successfully completed that Canderel started onboarding and transitioning its platform to Hypertec Cloud.
3. Choose a hybrid multicloud strategy that supports your business goals
When choosing a cloud solutions and services provider, companies can either work with “hyper-scalers” like AWS, Azure, and GCP, regional clouds tied to a particular geography, or with “closer to the edge” industrial clouds. Hypertec Cloud is a regional provider, which allows for a more hands-on approach whereby clients have their needs assessed thoroughly before being offered a tailored solution. This results in business support that clients wouldn’t necessarily get from hyper-scalers or other cloud providers.
As a company transitioning to the cloud, expect your infrastructure partner to recommend starting with an architecture that allows you to make the most of your budget, followed by the development of a proof of concept to understand your on-prem dependencies. These initial steps will help to determine the appropriate balance of the right cloud services for the right products so that you can reap the most benefits.
This is the flexible and agile approach that Hypertec Cloud offered Canderel; dedicated infrastructure, along with consulting, simplified billing, and personal client services. “[…] Hypertec always kept the lines of communication open, our team consistently worked with people they knew, which allowed us to maintain cost visibility, and manage constraints throughout the transition,” Lance Leblanc.
Canderel’s testimony shows that transitioning smoothly to the cloud can be achieved by teaming up with a partner that will help you identify and understand your business needs, encourage you to challenge and ask the right questions, and offer the specific infrastructure and on-going support to help you achieve your goals.
Missed the seminar? Download the SME Guide to Cloud webinar for the full Canderel story.
This post is also available in: FR
