Verwater renews: from on-premise to Azure within four months
When your on-premise server park reaches end-of-life, do you opt to renew your environment or keep it as it is? Verwater took the leap into the future and decided to migrate its entire environment to Azure using a lift & shift approach. Tom Raeymakers, ICT manager at Verwater, explains how this migration was completed within four months, what the benefits are, and what lies ahead.
Verwater is a global contractor for industrial and petrochemical installations, specializing in tank maintenance and tank construction. The company was founded in 1922 and employs around 1,000 people in Antwerp, Zeeland, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Delfzijl, Groningen, Emmen, and Lingen, among other locations. "About five years ago, we started updating our existing IT environment. At the time, we had a system administrator who knew the system inside out. For us, the time had come to standardize more," Tom begins the story. That's how Verwater came into contact with Wortell, initially for the MxDR service. This was quickly followed by the migration to Azure. The reason? A server park that had reached the end of its life.
Farewell to on-premise
“We had actually reached the point where our server park was in need of modernization. At that time, we were renting rack space because all our hardware and servers were housed in a data center. This presented us with a choice: do we continue to work on-premise, or do we take the first step toward a cloud solution?” This question was the starting point for discussions with Wortell to explore the possibilities. The change in the landscape and the way applications are available today was the deciding factor. "We still had the applications running on our own servers, but these are increasingly being offered as SaaS solutions, making the data center less relevant. The costs of running the applications there were no longer in line with the benefits. What's more, we are a Microsoft-minded company, so we try to follow that way of working as much as possible. Our ERP system, Business Central Microsoft, is also moving entirely to the cloud. It was a logical step: we said goodbye to on-premise and switched to Azure in the cloud via Wortell. The goal is to work entirely in the Azure environment."
We said goodbye to on-premise and switched to Azure in the cloud via Wortell. The goal was to work entirely in the Azure environment.
Lift & shift strategy
"Licenses were set to expire in the foreseeable future, as were the SLAs on hardware. We discussed with colleagues what the ideal moment would be to migrate, and that meant we had to move fairly quickly. That's why we opted for the lift & shift strategy. Literally picking up the VMs and rehosting them in Azure. And phase out certain things.” The project started in December 2024, Wortell began the migration in January 2025, and by April 1, 2025, Verwater had completely switched to Azure. “That went smoothly because we had a very good team. The folks at Wortell know what they're talking about, and the impact on end users has been minimal. That was the plan. Now that the migration is done, we've got room and opportunities to look to the future. First, we're finishing up the SaaS migration of Business Central in October, and then we'll keep optimizing Azure. Right now, we're using file shares. The next step is to replace these with Teams and thus further expand the integration of Teams.“
The roadmap for next year still needs to be drawn up, with a focus on greater impact for end users. Think of a more structured environment for data storage.”
The folks at Wortell know what they're talking about, and the impact on end users has been minimal. That was the plan.
Better accessibility and faster switching
At Verwater, the core business of ICT is to support project administration. "We have standard users who have a laptop with a Microsoft license. And we have colleagues who work with smartphones, such as foremen. There are also colleagues who have no contact with IT, such as welders. They submit their hours via administrative colleagues.“ In total, Verwater uses around 600 to 650 workstations. ”These are spread across some fifty locations: from our head offices to our customers' sites. This presents some challenges. But we also see an opportunity: Azure can offer us more, including in terms of accessibility.“ Verwater works with specific engineering software, which has been transferred to Azure. ”We are already seeing the benefits. It is an electronic drawing package that requires fast hardware from a server, which we did not have in our environment. In Azure, you have freedom of choice. As a result, we can now select much faster drives and work more efficiently."
We definitely see an opportunity here: Azure can offer us more, including in terms of accessibility
Preparing for the future
“What's interesting about Wortell is that there's quite a broad audience of specialists providing support. Behind every architect there's a whole team. I'm pleasantly surprised by that.” In the coming period, Verwater will be focusing on optimizing the Azure environment. “We migrated our on-premise environment to Azure in one go because of the speed we needed to achieve; that also translates into costs. A FinOps process is now underway to reduce those costs. We also have some work to do on storage. On-premise, we had many terabytes of data stored on hot storage. We are now looking at what we can archive and offer as cold storage. That takes time, but it also has advantages: we don't have to drag data around with us. Cleaning up every now and then is actually a good thing.“ It is precisely these kinds of opportunities that enable Verwater to prepare its IT environment for the future. ”Moving to Azure forces you to adopt a certain way of working. With an on-premise environment, you can be much more sloppy. In Azure, you work in a much more streamlined way and you have better control over processes. It simply offers more possibilities than we had before."
In Azure, you work in a much more streamlined way and you have better control over processes. It simply offers more possibilities than we had before.
Step-by-step transition to Azure
Vincent van de Ven and his colleague Joey Turlings, both Azure specialists at Wortell, share their experiences with Verwater. "We always proceed step by step. We made an inventory of the data center: what exactly is there, what do we need to migrate, how do we go about it? To this end, we drew up a plan together with Verwater, which also mapped out the impact on the user experience. After all, you want to avoid users being without business-critical applications for days on end. We started with a pilot group and looked at a representative set of servers with the associated applications. We started with the least critical ones, in case something went wrong.
After the migration, we went through all the different aspects. Together with Verwater, we created batches and after each batch we held a retrospective: what did we encounter, what insights did this provide and what does this mean for our next step? The practicalities of a migration can be tricky. For each application, there was a test group of end users who are familiar with the application from their daily work. These groups tested the application the morning after the migration. The migration was generally carried out outside office hours so that it could be done with minimal impact on end users.
In total, a whole list of servers, including three SQL servers, 36 Windows servers, one Linux server, fifteen applications, and three management servers for IT, were transferred in three batches. We worked extremely hard and planned meticulously to meet the deadline. The collaboration with Tom and other Verwater colleagues contributed to this, partly because they were well aware of the impact on the company and had a clear understanding of the applications. Communication was key!”