500+ workloads.
Zero business disruption.
A global industrial manufacturer needed to leave a fragmented, aging on-premises estate behind and land in Azure without stopping production. SKYTEK planned, built and executed the full program: domain consolidation, a Terraform-managed landing zone, migration, application modernization and an AI-driven security operation.
Years of growth had left the environment fragmented.
Acquisitions and regional autonomy had produced multiple Active Directory forests, separate identity systems, duplicated infrastructure across sites, and a mix of physical and virtual servers well past their support window. Security tooling was uneven from one site to the next, and there was no single view of what was running, who owned it, or what it cost.
What the client was carrying
- Multiple legacy domains and identity silos with inconsistent policy and trust relationships
- 500+ workloads across aging on-premises hosts, several out of vendor support
- Manually built infrastructure with no repeatable provisioning or documented standard
- Fragmented monitoring and point security products with no correlated view of threats
- Production and logistics systems that could not tolerate a maintenance-window-style cutover
- Rising hardware refresh and datacenter costs with no path to reduce them
Six phases, one continuous operation.
Each phase was designed so the business never had to choose between moving forward and staying open. Every cutover was rehearsed, rollback-ready and scheduled around the production calendar.
Map everything before moving anything
SKYTEK ran a full dependency and performance assessment across every site, mapping application-to-server relationships, data flows, identity dependencies and licensing. The result was a workload-by-workload disposition plan: what to rehost, what to modernize, what to retire.
Roughly one in ten discovered workloads was decommissioned instead of migrated. Nothing moved to the cloud that didn't earn its place.
Build the foundation as code
An enterprise-scale Azure landing zone was defined entirely in Terraform: management group hierarchy, hub-and-spoke networking, Azure Firewall, private DNS, policy guardrails, identity integration, logging and cost tagging. Every environment is reproducible from source control and every change goes through review.
Infrastructure stopped being something an engineer remembered how to build and became something the organization owns, versions and audits.
Collapse legacy forests into one identity
Multiple Active Directory forests were consolidated into a single directory synchronized to Microsoft Entra ID. SKYTEK migrated users, groups, machines and service accounts in pilot-validated waves, preserved SID history to keep access intact, and standardized Group Policy, naming and administrative tiers across every site.
One identity, one policy set and one sign-in experience for every user in every region, and a far smaller attack surface.
Move 500+ workloads without a production stop
Servers, file services, databases and line-of-business applications were rehosted to Azure using continuous replication with scheduled, rehearsed cutovers. Each wave had a tested rollback path and a live SKYTEK team on the bridge through hypercare. Backup and disaster recovery were rebuilt on Azure-native services with defined recovery objectives.
Every cutover landed inside its planned window. Unplanned downtime for the program: zero.
Retire the servers that didn't need to exist
Once stable in Azure, the highest-value applications were re-platformed onto managed services: web tiers to App Service, SQL Server instances to Azure SQL, file and integration workloads to storage and Azure Functions, and container-ready services to Azure Kubernetes Service. Patching, scaling and high availability moved from the client's to-do list to the platform.
Fewer virtual machines to patch, monitor and pay for, and applications that scale with demand instead of being sized for the busiest day of the year.
Stand up an AI-driven SOC and SIEM
With the estate consolidated, SKYTEK centralized telemetry from identity, endpoints, network, cloud and applications into a single SIEM, layered Microsoft Defender XDR across the environment, and put SKYTEK's 24×7 security operations center on watch with AI-driven detection, correlation and automated response playbooks.
The client went from site-by-site point products to one correlated view of the whole business, with analysts and automation responding around the clock.
A major upgrade in security, built into the platform rather than bolted on.
Consolidating identity and rebuilding the foundation as code made it possible to enforce controls everywhere at once. The security program is now measurable, auditable and continuously monitored.
Identity-first controls
Single directory, MFA everywhere, Conditional Access, privileged access tiering and just-in-time admin rights replaced a patchwork of local policies.
24×7 detection and response
SKYTEK's SOC monitors the full environment through a centralized SIEM, with AI-driven correlation to cut alert noise and automated playbooks to contain threats in minutes.
Compliance-ready by design
Azure Policy guardrails, immutable audit logging and standardized configuration give the client evidence on demand for customer and regulatory reviews.
What the business got back.
The program retired the datacenter footprint, eliminated hardware refresh cycles and replaced a growing list of point products with a single platform and a single operating partner.
The measure of a transformation this size isn't the technology. It's that the plant floor, the warehouse and the finance team never noticed it was happening.Michael Leonard, CEO and Founder, SKYTEK Solutions
Planning a migration, consolidation or security overhaul?
SKYTEK is an Azure Expert MSP and Microsoft Intelligent Security Association member with a SOC 2 Type II attestation and an ISO 27001-aligned ISMS. Talk to the team that ran this program end to end.