A cloud platform as the cornerstone of Fidelix’s services – witnessing one of Finland's most ambitious Azure migrations .

Fidelix's solutions are used to optimize features of architectural engineering, including energy costs and indoor conditions. The company has grown from a startup to one of the largest players in the industry in Finland: today, Fidelix's products improve the well-being of more than one million people daily. The growth has necessitated changes in the company’s IT infrastructure, implemented together with Enfo. 

The end result is one of Finland's largest Azure migrations, where some 100 servers and databases have so far been transferred to the cloud. Previously, the customers’ services were run in Fidelix's own data center on virtual servers.

“Our data center wasn’t able to scale with our growth, and the hardware began to show signs of aging,” says Mikko Alppivuori, Head of Cloud Operations at Fidelix. “In addition to scalability and ease of use, the public cloud allows us to take better advantage of new technologies, such as machine learning, which couldn’t have been implemented to the same extent in the local data center. In addition, the public cloud allows us to determine which service-specific security features we actually need.”

Enfo took on the job, first by setting up the O365 environment. The cloud migration was launched by creating a cloud governance model together with Enfo’s experts. After this, a proof-of-concept test of the migration into the Azure environment was carried out. There were some surprises along the way, but after the PoC, the migration was conducted on schedule. 

“Maintenance has been effortless in the cloud,” says Alppivuori. “During the coronavirus pandemic, we also realized that the public cloud made it possible to manage our hardware regardless of location, which is a great advantage. Our goal is to transfer everything we can to the cloud.”
 

Triumph over adversity

As the project progressed, it became apparent that the network infrastructure had to be rebuilt before starting the cloud integration. Enfo helped Fidelix prepare the environment so that the migration could be carried out.

“Despite the challenges, the project progressed on schedule, and we have been really happy with how Enfo has handled the migration. Enfo was also able to quickly respond to the situations we encountered as the migration progressed. Enfo’s experts are really good at what they do and we have always had access to skilled people who have been able to help us, even despite our sometimes unordinary needs,” Alppivuori laughs. 

“I strongly recommend carrying out the migration because of the substantial benefits it brings. Without cloud migration, the maintenance of the data center and systems would have caused us considerable problems when COVID-19 hit. We were able to tell our employees that they could work from home, and the coronavirus hasn’t affected our work. Had we had our own data center, the situation would have been quite different.”

“It's a good idea to start carrying out the migration systematically and to think about all the parties that are going to be working in the cloud, such as coders and partner networks. Often, companies go wrong by not considering the whole or how the cloud is going to be managed a few years and hundreds of servers down the road. In other words, doing the groundwork carefully before implementation pays off,” shares Alppivuori.

Beginning from its founding in 2002, Fidelix has developed a smart, reliable and broadly compatible construction automation system. Today, the company’s expertise in intelligent construction automation benefits customers in the form of improved indoor conditions, lower energy consumption and lower maintenance costs.

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