Large Azure Migration Project
Full infrastructure migration and post go-live support
Introduction
Following a management buy-out, Macro Group Ltd, a global leading facilities management firm, needed to quickly separate its IT infrastructure from that of its former parent company, Mace Group. At the heart of Macro's operations is MRI Software’s Concept Evolution, a critical system used for facilities management, lease tracking, maintenance scheduling, and service request handling.
The company’s primary challenge was to migrate all workloads - including the Concept platform - into a new, independent Azure environment. Macro Group also had various other Azure workloads that needed migrating - including cloud drives and other lightweight web portals.
This migration needed to be accomplished with minimal disruption, while also ensuring the new setup was secure, scalable, and compliant with best practices for governance and cost control.
Challenges
Prior to the split, Macro's IT, including its Azure infrastructure, was tightly integrated with it's parent company, Mace Group. All resources, from servers, to databases, to virtual networks, were centrally managed within an Azure tenant operated by Mace Group.
Identity services and access control was also centralised, with users relying on Mace Group's Entra ID directory. MRI Concept was hosted in another environment, with SQL databases, app services, and integrations co-located with unrelated systems, not uncommon for large enterprises who have outsourced IT to various vendors in the past. This lack of autonomy limited the company’s ability to enforce its own security policies, manage costs, and respond flexibly to business demands.
The migration project was driven by four primary goals: to establish a completely independent Azure tenant, to securely transition Concept Evolution and their other applications with minimal downtime, to align the new environment with industry best practices, and to future-proof the platform for scalability, integration, and innovation.
Our Solution
Because of the complexity of the legacy setup, and the desire to build a cost-effective hosting model, Macro Group opted to rebuild their architecture from scratch, copying over just their files and databases. They chose Dolphin IT Solutions, their long-standing IT partner, to carry out this migration.
We started with all the quick wins - shared drives, application databases, etc., and conducted the content migration out of hours, before repointing the application's connections to the new drives and databases. This was all conducted in a testing environment first to fully validate that minimal, if none at all, downtime was possible.
After the dust had settled on the migrated resources, we then migrated some of Macro's bespoke web applications. We rebuilt these as app services - or container apps where possible, using the best hosting plans that achieved a balance between performance and cost effectiveness.
Finally, we rebuilt the new Concept Evolution environment; this is a product run on Windows Server. We set this up as a load balanced solution, with the balancing handled via Azure Application Gateway. This allows us to conduct patches on the web servers without impacting users, as the system is in use 24/7. This migration was thoroughly tested in a UAT environment a few weeks prior to the production environment's migration.
Overall, the Azure migration allowed the company to fully sever technical ties with its former parent organisation, establishing a robust, secure Azure environment under its sole control. MRI Concept Evolution, and all of Macro's other workloads, continued to function seamlessly, supported by an improved infrastructure, clearer governance, and tighter security controls.
The new environment not only resolved compliance and autonomy concerns, but also created a scalable foundation for future growth, integration with third-party platforms, and further modernisation of the company's technology stack.
