Steelmet sought new digital capabilities to help the Viohalco companies’ laser-focus their operations and better navigate market and technological disruption. Steelmet placed efficiency front and center and transformed Viohalco companies’ digital architecture, governance, and management with Microsoft Azure Arc. With Azure Arc, Steelmet has unified Viohalco companies’ architecture, infrastructure management, and operations governance using a single pane of glass, and it uses the automation available in Azure Policy to improve the companies’ user security configuration.
As a holding company for Europe’s leading metal processing companies, Viohalco knows the value of efficiency. Viohalco companies have production facilities in the United Kingdom, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and North Macedonia, along with holdings in companies with production facilities in Turkey, Russia, and The Netherlands. With annual revenues of EUR5.37 billion (2021), Viohalco companies serve dynamic and evolving industries, like construction, transportation, energy, HVAC and refrigeration, telecommunications, utilities, and printing, by providing the aluminum, copper, cables, steel pipes, and steel products they need to thrive.
“We have managed to adopt a new infrastructure, increase our management footprint, and gain more control without increasing costs. Azure Arc helps us achieve economies of scale to truly optimize our operational expenditures.”
Dimitris Stathopoulos, Digital Security Officer, Steelmet
A new digital architecture
Standing right behind Viohalco companies, to provide support, drive best practices, and maximize efficiency, is Steelmet.
Steelmet sought new digital capabilities to help the Viohalco companies’ laser-focus their operations and better navigate market and technological disruption. Steelmet placed efficiency front and center and transformed Viohalco companies’ digital architecture, governance, and management with Microsoft Azure Arc.
An arc of versatility
Steelmet knew the cloud could simplify deployment efforts and streamline go-to-market timelines, but it was also learning the value of the cloud’s versatility. A long-standing Microsoft customer, Steelmet had already deployed Microsoft 365 to create a stronger modern work experience, and used Azure Virtual Machines to run multiple workloads in the cloud. However, to meet the companies’ business needs and realize the value of technology investments, Steelmet needed to govern and manage a hybrid and multicloud environment.
Like many manufacturers, Viohalco companies ran numerous on-premises systems in their plants and warehouses. Accordingly, Steelmet and the Viohalco companies’ IT and (operational technology) OT teams collaborated on digitizing manufacturing workloads and needed a platform capable of addressing the security of their hybrid workloads. They wanted quick, easy deployments, the capacity to move workloads with zero downtime, and low operational overhead. With Azure Arc, Steelmet and the Viohalco companies’ IT and OT teams delivered on all fronts.
“The Viohalco companies have grown through acquisitions and, as a result, have acquired numerous technologies and dispersed datacenters,” says Dimitris Stathopoulos, Digital Security Officer at Steelmet. “We used Azure Arc as a catalyst to manage a broad range of different assets across a baseline configuration—without interrupting business operations.”
Heightened security, swiftly realized
Steelmet—keeping efficiency and value creation foremost—began the Azure Arc deployment with a small proof of concept, by enrolling and testing some of its key assets. Satisfied with the results, it quickly turned to deploying Azure Arc on its mission-critical assets. Steelmet and the Viohalco companies used Azure Policy to increase enrollment services in Azure Arc and to unify and streamline management of their 324 on-premises and cloud servers. This rapid, centralized deployment and robust management came with enhanced security functionality as well.
“The security umbrella that comes with Azure Arc,” says Stathopoulos, “provides us with really fast-moving results, and extends security insights from the cloud to the whole organization, helping us to optimize infrastructure consistently.”
Compliance confirmed
ISO and General Data Protection Regulation compliance is mandatory for Steelmet and Viohalco companies, and they use Azure Arc to help make these compliance challenges both transparent and traversable. Historically, Viohalco companies required an on-premises solution to gain insights on the regulatory compliance of their infrastructure. They now apply Microsoft Defender for Cloud across their hybrid infrastructure with Azure Arc to gain immediate intelligence on compliance and security controls.
”The insight we gain with Azure Arc provides a path we can follow with recommendations on how to better protect our systems, data, and clients,” says Stathopoulos. “After deploying Azure Arc and seeing the magic of Microsoft Defender for Cloud, we almost feel like we were flying blind before.”
Seamless, transparent management
Viohalco companies’ admixture of systems from various acquisitions has led to heavy on-premises assets, and regional diversity posed significant obstacles to the harmonization of their IT operations. With Azure Arc, Steelmet has unified Viohalco companies’ architecture, infrastructure management, and operations governance using a single pane of glass, and it uses the automation available in Azure Policy to improve the companies’ user security configuration. Azure Policy enables governance of Log Analytics workspaces, Defender for Cloud, and any other existing subscription or future resource deployed, and it manages its entire environment through a single console.
“In the future, we plan to perform configuration path management for every IP asset we have,” says Stathopoulos. “We can enroll everything on-premises to Azure Arc and manage our servers entirely from one place.”
Agility, end to end
By centralizing management with Azure Arc, Steelmet manages Viohalco companies’ broad and diverse infrastructure more readily and cost-effectively and reinvests the time and effort in developing ways to deliver new higher-quality products faster. Deployment and configuration processes that used to take many months now get done in weeks.
“We deployed Azure Arc for better, easier infrastructure management and to help us gain consistency while minimizing resources,” says Stathopoulos. “We have managed to adopt a new infrastructure, increase our management footprint, and gain more control without increasing costs. Azure Arc helps us achieve economies of scale to truly optimize our operational expenditures.”
“The agility, support, product knowledge, and best practices we gained from working with Microsoft helped us to secure maximum value and support on our cloud journey.”
New architecture, new mindset
By using Azure Arc to help bring its ecosystem to the cloud, Steelmet works more efficiently, improves responsiveness to Viohalco companies’ business needs, and shifts from traditional infrastructure maintenance to a more agile culture to deliver fast, consistent, and continuous improvements. With Azure Arc and the underlying Azure control plane, Steelmet’s developers design hybrid and multicloud architectures for their applications; they build cloud solutions and application architectures consistently, independent of where the application runs.
A shift toward a more agile mindset helps Steelmet to convert its architecture from an object of reactive maintenance to an agent of proactive problem-solving. The company moved from a siloed modus operandi to a more DevOps-oriented one, bringing together development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security teams to collaborate and ultimately produce better, more reliable products and achieve business goals faster.
“We now work more efficiently. With the time saved, we have harmonized configuration across all our systems,” says Stathopoulos. “With Azure Arc, we provide better quality service at lower costs. When we fully adopt an agile approach, we will have the ability to deliver new services in a consistent manner that will give immediate business value and turn us into a profit center.”
“The agility, support, product knowledge, and best practices we gained from working with Microsoft helped us to secure maximum value and support on our cloud journey.”
Dimitris Stathopoulos, Digital Security Officer, Steelmet
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