The migration project at Alcopa was very substantial. It was given the name ‘Alcopa IT Transition’ for good reason. “That transition was necessary because Alcopa has also gone through a transformation as an organization,” says Bruno Bandella, Investment Manager at Alcopa. “We have evolved from an industrial holding company to a more diversified investment holding company. Our portfolio companies now operate independently and we are majority shareholders but not 100% in most cases. Therefore, we wanted to move away from the ‘shared service center’ with a central IT service that worked only for the holding company and one or two participations.”

Switching from own servers to Azure

So Alcopa had to make the holding company’s IT environment independent and cut all the links with the other companies. “We managed to do that with Cheops as a partner,” says Werner Heyen, Consolidation Manager at Alcopa.

The solution Cheops worked out was a new infrastructure with migration to another cloud. The entire project was completed in about six months. Cheops migrated Alcopa’s entire Office environment from a locally installed version to Office 365 in Microsoft’s public cloud. This includes, in addition to the classic office applications such as Word and Excel, extensive possibilities for more efficient collaboration via Teams.

“Our move to the independent infrastructure was around in 2019. Coincidentally, this also meant we were already prepared for the current covid pandemic,” notes Bruno Bandella. “Since our entire IT environment is accessible online, we were able to continue working, communicating and collaborating very easily when we were unable to come to the office.”