Knorr-Bremse moves on the path of digitization and cuts costs with Azure VMware Solution

Putting the brakes on on-premises datacenters

With its top-of-the-line products for rail and commercial vehicles, German manufacturer Knorr-Bremse contributes to safety on rail tracks and roads around the world every day. The 117-year-old company has 30,500 employees spread across 100 locations, including 80 production sites, in more than 30 countries and is a trusted supplier of braking systems, intelligent door systems, control components, and other safety-critical parts.

Knorr-Bremse had the rare opportunity to completely reimagine its approach to technology and promote digitization across the business. Wanting to evolve as a data-driven company, the manufacturer recognized cloud infrastructure as a core building block of a strategic approach to future growth. Industry innovator Knorr-Bremse is moving forward with an expansive Microsoft Azure migration. “This was the best time to move to the cloud and pursue our big goal of eliminating datacenter costs as we were set to retire our existing hardware,” reflects Thomas Auer, Director of IT Back End and Cloud Service at Knorr-Bremse.

The manufacturer initially struggled to find the right strategy to migrate its datacenters to a cloud platform. Learning about Knorr-Bremse’s situation, Microsoft and Cloud Partner Program member MobiLab Solutions GmbH created an all-encompassing Azure business case showing possible migration paths aligned with both companies’ expertise in digital product and cloud transformation. The business case highlighted a wide range of benefits, including cost savings, performance enhancements, and the ability to create new products easily and quickly for customers.

Given Knorr-Bremse’s long-standing relationship with Microsoft, including its successful adoption of cloud-based Microsoft 365, it didn’t take much convincing to choose Azure. “Our company was already almost 90 percent with Microsoft in our datacenters, so it was more a question of why not use Azure? Our CIO’s vision is for us to ultimately develop into a cloud-first company, and an Azure migration supported that goal,” says Auer.

Making the most of an Azure migration with Azure VMware Solution

To simplify and streamline its Azure migration, Knorr-Bremse’s IT team started moving applications to its Azure VMware Solution, giving itself time to develop employees’ skills before shifting more complex workloads. “We wanted to minimize the change for our application owners and users, learn our way around Azure with our teams, and then modernize,” says Auer.

Knorr-Bremse asked MobiLab to help analyze its existing on-premises infrastructure and early-stage cloud usage so that the manufacturer could define an end-to-end cloud strategy with an ultimate exit from all 17 of its datacenters. The initial Azure migration included its IBM Db2 database, 750 Windows Server 2019 servers, 141 SQL Server instances, 415 Linux servers, and nearly 400 on-premises applications. After starting to relocate servers using VMware HCX with Azure VMware Solution, Knorr-Bremse followed advice to replatform some of its applications on Azure platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) environments and rehost others with Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) environments to fully benefit from a cloud-native ecosystem. “Without Azure VMware Solution, we don’t have a solution,” says Auer. Because using Azure VMware Solution meant that only minor optimization of virtual machines and applications was required, administrators have been able to perform the same tasks as before while enjoying new efficiencies from working on Azure, all without interruption.

Migrating and switching off datacenters with support from Microsoft and MobiLab

At the heart of Knorr-Bremse’s cloud migration lies a complete datacenter revolution. The company’s 17 datacenters and 1,700 servers are spread across the globe with central infrastructure hosted in Munich. As it debated whether to renew or exit its datacenters, it also sought to harmonize security and governance measures across its entire IT landscape and automatically provision resources with a governance-as-code approach. Knorr-Bremse opted to move all 17 of its datacenters to Azure, prioritizing its Munich datacenter and a locally hosted datacenter in Hong Kong as the first to decommission. 

Teams across the company contributed to the development and implementation of the company’s Azure environment. “Most people on our IT teams, application development teams, central cloud teams, and product teams have nearly completed Microsoft trainings and certifications,” says Auer. “And the changes with Azure have felt very manageable.”

The company attributes the ease of its transformation to the flexibility offered by Azure for migrating various application types to the cloud platform. Microsoft provided Knorr-Bremse support through a dedicated FastTrack for Azure engineering team and hands-on training initiatives, covered by the umbrella of the Azure Migration and Modernization Program. MobiLab also played a key role in the initial migration and with project success monitoring, and it will soon support modernization efforts.

Knorr-Bremse expects to completely switch off its on-premises datacenters in the next two years, realizing its vision of becoming a cloud-first business. To keep the migration process within budget, the company’s IT team uses Microsoft Cost Management in the Azure portal to monitor and reduce cloud spending while maximizing efficiency.

Security was an important consideration for Knorr-Bremse decision-makers, who value proven and trusted Microsoft security solutions and built-in support for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance. In addition to its Azure migration, Knorr-Bremse rolled out Microsoft 365 E5 to 20,000 employees and Microsoft 365 F3 and Microsoft 365 F5 to 8,000 frontline workers. The company uses Microsoft Sentinel to help protect its Azure virtual machines and Azure Backup to improve business continuity and disaster recovery. It’s evaluating Azure Site Recovery to further protect its environment from potential downtime.

Accelerating digitization and staying ahead of market curves

Through its journey with Azure, Knorr-Bremse has achieved both cost and resource management benefits across the company, with scalability and flexibility now enjoyed by multiple teams and business units. It has accelerated its digitization projects and its time to market with new products and innovations, and employees now spend less time on routine tasks and more on meaningful projects. “With the ongoing transformation to Azure, compared with our previous on-premises strategy, we will be able to save millions of costs in the future,” says Auer. “Our IT projects are no longer dependent on cost—they’re digitally driven and enabled. And continuing to digitize with Azure will help us take advantage of new opportunities.”

Knorr-Bremse’s strategy evolves with every new Azure service it evaluates. Based on the gains experienced from its initial Azure migration and deployment of products like Microsoft 365 and Azure VMware Solution, the company remains on track to move 100 percent of its workloads to Azure.

An emerging digital leader in the rail industry, Knorr-Bremse plans to use its ongoing digital transformation to support product advances and innovation. The company is transitioning its IT admins from on-premises management responsibilities to positions in its emerging Cloud Center of Excellence, including multiple cloud admin roles. It also recently rolled out an internal Digital Leader project to make cloud technologies more accessible to employees and expedite the growth of its rail business.

“Digital Leader is one example of us helping our employees build new applications on our Azure infrastructure, and that’s just the beginning,” says Auer. “It’s our mission and part of our overall cloud-first strategy to enable the business to develop new products based on cloud technologies and digitization to be ahead of the curve in the market.”

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