“We teamed up with Microsoft to deliver a more agile, scalable, and cost-effective environment. We‘ve achieved success with all of our cloud goals and are excited to continue the trajectory with Azure.”
Martin Kozisek, Transformation Manager, O2 Czech Republic
Martin Kozisek, Transformation Manager at O2 Czech Republic, was at the forefront of that change. “We started to prepare our cloud strategy at the end of 2019,” he says. “We worked with the local Microsoft team to understand how we could gain the most benefit from the move.” O2 Czech Republic aimed to become more agile, speed up innovation, and bring new products to market faster. “We sent out a request for proposal to hyperscalers, including Amazon, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft,” recalls Kozisek. “We found that the Microsoft Azure cloud platform not only fulfilled all of our requirements, it was also the most cost-effective choice.” Two years in, O2 Czech Republic has moved more than 30 workloads to Azure and plans to continue its cloud journey.
Gaining peace of mind with Azure services
Prior to O2 Czech Republic launching its cloud strategy, the business ran containerized workloads on-premises. “When we decided to move to the cloud, we had to ensure certain objectives could be achieved,” says Kozisek. “First, we needed to prove that our level of security with Azure would be as good or better than we had on-premises. Second, that we could achieve cost savings with the move, and third, that there would be no legal issues. Our research and discussions with Microsoft gave us peace of mind that we could meet all of our requirements with Azure.” Ultimately, O2 Czech Republic took advantage of the Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative to gain skills and knowledge of Azure technologies and a Microsoft Unified Support contract, including a dedicated customer support engineer. “The support we received from Microsoft has been great,” says Kozisek. “We’re looking forward to continuing to evolve our cloud strategy with Microsoft going forward.”
After O2 Czech Republic decided to move ahead with Azure, the company created a center of excellence. According to Kozisek, the success of the company’s cloud adoption was in large part due to the center of excellence team, who worked to manage cloud infrastructure, security features, and supported DevOps processes in the new cloud architecture. O2 Czech Republic also engaged Microsoft Partner Network member Ness and other partners, including Emeldi, Teradata, Orbit, Cloudfield, Trask, and Datalite, to work with the center to develop and deploy workloads to Azure. “We’ve made it a priority to build Azure competency on our side,” says Kozisek. “However, by enlisting help from our partners, we also free up some of our IT resources to focus on other tasks and be more efficient.”
O2 Czech Republic began its migration of its containerized workloads to Azure with workloads that were already written in cloud-native architecture, like its customer trouble ticketing and self-diagnosis application. “We wanted to test the ecosystem for security and see what it would mean to run these applications in the cloud,” says Kozisek. “We were happy with the initial results of running our important customer trouble ticketing application in Azure.” Buoyed by the success of the ticketing application’s move, O2 decided to build a new big data platform on Azure. He continues, “Our big data platform was reaching the end of its lifecycle, and we decided that rather than upgrade it on-premises, we would start from scratch building a new, cloud-based version with Azure.” Today, the organization uses Azure Machine Learning services and Microsoft managed database services such as Azure Databricks, Azure Data Factory, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, and Azure Database for MySQL.
The most recent aspect of O2’s cloud journey has been a migration of its Teradata warehouse to Azure, and the company is eager to move more self-service customer workloads to the cloud. “When a customer wants to, for instance, buy a new service via a mobile application or upgrade their subscription for a certain product, we would like those processes to happen in Azure,” says Kozisek. “It’s part of how we’re delivering faster, more reliable services for customers.”
Improving the customer experience, saving costs, and speeding development
Today, O2 Czech Republic runs more than 30 workloads in the cloud, with great results for both customers and O2 employees. One such workload is a self-service application related to O2 TV, where customers can sign in to watch live sports events. “We moved our Central Authentication Service workload to Azure and improved the sign-in experience for customers,” says Kozisek. “Now that we’re running this workload in Azure, it’s capable of signing in 1,000 clients per second, versus 250 clients in the same time with our on-premises solution.”
O2 Czech Republic also improved ease of use for IT pros at the company. “We established security that’s on par with our on-premises setup, but it’s much easier for our people to review and react to events as they happen now with Azure DDoS Protection, Sentinel, and Azure Firewall,” says Kozisek. “Now, it’s much easier to deploy new workloads because they’re configured automatically, making the process more scalable.” O2 Czech Republic is also benefiting from the ease of adoption that comes with a strong compliance portfolio. "Microsoft has obviously invested heavily to demonstrate compliance with all necessary security and technical standards, such as ISO and GDPR,” says Kozisek.
O2 not only saves time with its streamlined security processes, but the company also saves costs for every workload it’s moved to the cloud. “When we decided which workloads to modernize and move to Azure, we had a requirement that we would save 30 percent of total cost of ownership over five years,” says Kozisek. “That’s true of everything we’ve moved to Azure so far.”
Another key goal: reduce innovation cycles. “Introducing new technology used to take us about six months,” remembers Kozisek. “Today, we can do it in just one month on the Azure cloud platform. Executing a proof of concept is also faster and easier, and the adoption path is smoother and shorter.” The company’s ability to bring new products to market quickly has already had significant benefits beyond O2 Czech Republic. For example, it rapidly developed a COVID-19 tracing solution that the Czech government ultimately used to help track the virus. “We were able to deliver this solution incredibly quickly with the Azure platform,” says Kozisek. “One of the major impacts of moving to Azure is that we’ve sped up development. We can now be more agile in responding to customer needs and demands as they arise.” The company continues to develop and deploy new solutions, and today, all of O2 Czech Republic’s cloud-native applications run on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
After two years of positive outcomes, O2 Czech Republic plans to further its Azure-based cloud transformation. “We teamed up with Microsoft to deliver a more agile, scalable, and cost-effective environment,” says Kozisek. “We‘ve achieved success with all of our cloud goals and are excited to continue the trajectory with Azure. The reliability of the workloads combined with the cost optimization of moving to Azure proves that we’re already benefiting from our cloud strategy.”
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“When we decided which workloads to modernize and move to Azure, we had a requirement that we would save 30 percent of total cost of ownership over five years. That’s true of everything we’ve moved to Azure so far.”
Martin Kozisek, Transformation Manager, O2 Czech Republic
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