Vredevoogd’s Migration to the Cloud

High Expectations & High Costs

Back in 2020, the primary IT infrastructure of the 1964-founded Vredevoogd (pronounced Vray-duh- vogue) comprised two on-premise physical servers and four virtual servers. Together those servers supported about 60 workstations while safely storing data and documentation on more than a half-century’s worth of Vredevoogd’s customers and the heating, cooling, plumbing, or generator services performed for each.

“While it was a smaller server footprint, it was still very critical to their day-to-day operation and service to clients,” says Vredevoogd’s longtime account manager at Rehmann Technology Solutions (RTS), which has served as Vredevoogd’s managed service provider (MSP) for the last 15 years.

“Vredevoogd was exceptionally concerned about downtime because if their system went kaput, it could really hinder their performance and how they could do things. So because of their need for redundancy, they actually spent more on hardware than a typical client of their size would,” he says.

Mike Sikkema, Vredevoogd’s longtime IT coordinator, explains: “Our biggest fear is and always was, “OK, if the phone stops ringing, if [the servers] go down, and we just simply can’t reach our data, we’ve got no revenue coming in. We’ve got 100+ employees sitting there with nothing to do,” Keeping that equipment up to date, however, wasn’t cheap. First, there was the common capital expense of purchasing new servers every few years, including the licensing and vendor support costs.

And, adds Sikkema, Vredevoogd didn’t buy just any servers. “The gentlemen who owned the company at the time [brothers Michael and Thomas Vredevoogd, sons of founder Dennis Vredevoogd] saw a lot of value in redundancy,” he says. “They saw a lot of value in staying current and being cutting edge by not allowing anything to age out. And with servers, there’s good, better, and best. They saw the best [servers available] as the best odds of insulating Vredevoogd and ensuring that we’re always going to stay up and running, with no interruptions.”

Along with the cost of replacing those high-end servers every few years, Vredevoogd also had to contend with the added expense of paying RTS, its managed service provider, to monitor, service, secure, patch, and back up those servers.

Nevertheless, it was RTS that suggested a way Vredevoogd could cut those annual expenses — by eliminating its on-premise server infrastructure and transitioning to a less costly option: the cloud.

Integrity in Infrastructure and Business

One of several other services RTS provides Vredevoogd is a virtual chief information officer (vCIO) which assists organizations with strategic planning.

The RTS vCIO who has worked closely Vredevoogd for the past six years recognizes the irony of suggesting Vredevoogd eliminate an expense that ultimately boosted RTS’ revenue. But, he notes, RTS’ goal is to provide clients the proper solution; not a recommendation based on revenue.

“We don’t feel it makes a whole lot of sense for many of our clients to keep paying for servers and refreshing hardware when we could easily move to serverless and save you that monthly cost,” he says. The recommendation wasn’t a flippant one. Just a few years prior, the vCIO says he wouldn’t have suggested such a leap; several factors needed to be in place first.

Cloud Consideration No. 1: Stability

Before 2020, there remained a big difference between all that organizations could build themselves versus what they could do in the cloud, says the RTS vCIO.

“We steer clients not to be on the bleeding edge of new technologies,” he says. “We want to wait while these developers are still figuring out all the kinks and bugs because we want our clients to be stable while advancing their capabilities.”

Thanks in no small part to Microsoft 365 and Azure — the former a cloud-based suite of productivity tools and services; the latter a cloud platform — cloud computing drastically matured in 2020. The tech world had finally reached what many in tech consider “feature parity,” the point where the features, services, and performance available in the cloud are on par with those of on-premise infrastructure.

That’s when Sikkema and his RTS vCIO began discussing the possibility of Vredevoogd transitioning to a serverless environment. But, it’s worth noting, cloud parity isn’t reason enough for a company to migrate.

Cloud Consideration No. 2: Is the cloud a right fit?

Before any organization considers moving its data, applications, and other tools from on-premise servers to a cloud environment, RTS recommends conducting an objective, fact-based analysis. As Sikkema grew more intrigued with the opportunities a switch to the cloud posed, he greenlighted RTS’ Cloud Readiness Assessment, which evaluates a variety of factors, such as:

• Where a business is in its current hardware lifecycle
• Anticipated costs of server according to cycle timing
• Client size
• Number of server systems running operations
• Cost of licensing
• Costs of any infrastructure necessary to support premise operations (power, cooling, )
• Cost of MSP service costs (hardware, firmware maintenance, patches, )
• Cost of managed backups for premise-based servers

For Vredevoogd, the projected savings was compelling. So, too, was the harder-to-quantify factor of reducing its risk. Shifting to the cloud meant Vredevoogd would also offload the potential risks, such as local equipment failure, the company shouldered by having physical servers on its premises.

Implementation

With the decision made, Vredevoogd’s transition to the cloud moved swiftly and easily, says Sikkema. “We began in the third quarter of 2021, and … by January or February of 2022, we more or less had everything nailed down and done.”

To minimize the amount of “stuff” that would move to the cloud and optimize performance, RTS charged Sikkema with winnowing down and deleting any old, duplicate, and irrelevant files from Vredevoogd’s servers.

Meanwhile, a member RTS’ team guided Sikkema on how to prepare Vredevoogd’s people ahead of the transition, demonstrating how files and tools in the new cloud configuration would operate and look afterward.

“There’s always that anticipation of something going wrong,” says Sikkema, “so all the preparation that went into it was mostly to alleviate that level of fear with our people.”

Turns out, Sikkema need not have worried. To make the new cloud environment — newly hosting Vredevoogd’s email, VoIP phone system, SharePoint, OneDrive, and more — as easy as possible for Vredevoogd’s staff to navigate, RTS and Sikkema arranged the layout and organization of the files and tools so their appearance and accessibility in the cloud closely mirrored how they’d appeared on the local servers.

After the transition, the RTS team worked with each Vredevoogd staff member while they sat in front of their workstation, walking them through the new environment and assisting them with any new processes.

“It was certainly one on one,” Sikkema says of RTS’ personal guidance from preparation to post-migration. “And in the end, we realized this wasn’t all that different than what we’d been used to. The learning curve was surprisingly short.”

Sikkema credits the ease of Vredevoogd migration experience to the fact that “RTS did the lion’s share of driving.”

The Migration

Although every migration to the cloud is different and tailored to each company’s unique needs and goals, RTS did the following as part of Vredevoogd’s migration to the cloud:

• Moved files into Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft OneDrive
• Increased Microsoft Office 365 monitoring and protections (utilizing Microsoft 365 Entra ID P1 for MFA and conditional access along with Microsoft Secure Score recommendations)
• Recommended expansion and further utilization of Microsoft 365 Business Premium services after migration to leverage licensing
• Shifted governing management of Vredevoogd assets through mobile device management (MDM) within Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Endpoint Manager).
• Recommended information protection review to ensure appropriate controls over sensitive information and establish use.
• With the move to Azure native and a serverless design, shifted focus to vendor management and managing third-party risks.
• Performed annual security reviews of key vendors and controls to ensure the security posture meets Vredevoogd’s
• Recommended vCISO (virtual chief information security officer) services to ensure organizational risks are managed and ensure progress continued with the CyberReady program. Vredevoogd selected a Tier 2 governance strategy, Improving Critical Infrastructure
• Recommended lowering annual vCIO engagements from four to two, considering the migration to serverless demanded less vCIO oversight.
• Recommended adjustment to Barracuda archiver to match an appropriate retention schedule.

Results

Ultimately, RTS eliminated Vredevoogd’s on-premise servers and storage and its three virtual servers (two DC, or domain controller servers, which respond to security authentication requests), and one dedicated to the phone system, saving Vredevoogd $6,932 in annual support costs annually.

Because Microsoft doesn’t provide native backup, RTS expanded Vredevoogd’s use of Barracuda Essentials to include backup of Microsoft 365, to which RTS also deployed multifactor authentication with conditional access — better protecting Vredevoogd’s email accounts and other sensitive information in its new environment.

The move to a serverless design also enabled Vredevoogd to transition its three endpoint detection and response licenses to other endpoints, which expanded its workstation coverage and enhanced its ability to stop sophisticated threats at additional points of entry.

As additional Heartland brands in the region have been brought under Vredevoogd’s management, RTS has been able to apply its strategic IT approach to keep Vredevoogd up to date — and even ahead of — changes in the technology landscape while effectively planning and budgeting for its future, says Sikkema.

Although he appreciates the reduction in costs and moving parts the migration to the cloud made possible, Sikkema says it’s the trust in RTS’s approach and advice over the years that has made the relationship so valuable to him and Vredevoogd, and now, to Heartland.

“I know [everyone at RTS is] looking out for us,” Sikkema says. “In investing, you have fiduciaries. They are honor bound and duty bound to make decisions that are in the best interest of the client. And I’ve always got the impression that when [they] make a suggestion and tell us, ‘This is in your best interest,’ it’s proven out to be the case.”

With all data and applications secured, streamlined, and efficiently operating in the cloud rather than its own on-premise server room, Vredevoogd today shoulders less risk and costs, which has given the business more opportunity and elbow room to invest in other tech-forward endeavors.

Heartland has certainly taken notice. Pleased with the results of the cloud transition RTS and Vredevoogd undertook, Heartland leadership has since made Vredevoogd one of its pioneer brands in the Heartland ecosystem.