Case study / Healthcare
A global life sciences leader rebuilt a fragmented estate as one governed hybrid multi-cloud platform across 35+ countries.
Gruve aligned workload placement, cloud governance, hyper-converged infrastructure, automation and centralized operations around compliance, latency, cost and business continuity.
Days to same day
Infrastructure provisioning moved from a multi-day manual request cycle to automated same-day delivery
3 platforms, 1 view
Azure, AWS and the on-premises estate run from one operational dashboard
35+
Countries operating on the governed hybrid platform
6R framework
Workloads classified as rehost, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire or retain before migration decisions
The Challenge
It could not be solved by moving to the cloud
The estate had grown through multiple technology refreshes and acquisitions, leaving a complex hybrid environment that was increasingly hard to manage: aging virtualization infrastructure, legacy compute and storage, rising hardware maintenance costs, capacity limits and technology silos across global regions. Manufacturing plants, R&D facilities, laboratories and customer-facing applications all carried high availability, security and regulatory requirements.
Cloud adoption was already inconsistent, with limited workload portability, no centralized governance, rising cloud operating costs and manual provisioning, so the cloud side needed governing before it could absorb anything more. At the same time, applications requiring low latency, manufacturing integration, regulatory compliance, large database workloads or local processing had to stay on-premises. The modernization had to work on both sides of that boundary at once.
Why Gruve
Placement decided by requirement, not by mandate
Every workload was scored against business criticality, application dependencies, compliance, performance, migration complexity, licensing and cost. That let the customer adopt Azure and AWS where those platforms were the right answer, and modernize the retained estate on a new hyper-converged platform where regulation, manufacturing integration or latency made public cloud the wrong answer. Gruve’s differentiated deliverables were the assessment, migration wave plan, governed hybrid architecture, hyper-converged platform deployment, automation, backup governance, security baselines and centralized operations view. Both sides then ran under one centralized operations model.
The Approach
Score every workload, then place it
Step 1
Discovery and assessment
Compute, storage and network discovery, dependency mapping, application inventory, VMware assessment and backup analysis, with every workload scored on criticality, dependencies, compliance, performance, migration complexity, licensing and cost. Output: current state assessment, dependency matrix, migration wave plan, cloud readiness report and target architecture.
Step 2
Hybrid target architecture, placed by requirement
Azure took enterprise applications, Active Directory, backup, disaster recovery and monitoring. AWS took analytics, cloud-native services, containers and dev and test. Workloads bound by latency, manufacturing integration, compliance, large databases or local processing were retained on-premises. Applications were categorized with the 6R framework.
Step 3
Hyper-converged platform deployment and migration
A new VMware-based hyper-converged platform replaced the aging virtualization estate, followed by physical-to-virtual and VMware-to-VMware migration, storage migration, VM optimization, performance validation, application testing and production cutover across servers, databases, ERP, manufacturing applications, laboratory systems, middleware, backup and hybrid connectivity.
Step 4
Security, governance, automation and one operations view
Identity with multi-factor authentication and role-based access control, security baselines, vulnerability management and encryption at rest and in transit; resource tagging, cost management, policy enforcement and backup governance; automated provisioning, infrastructure as code, patch, backup and monitoring automation; all consolidated into centralized operations with event correlation, executive dashboards and SLA reporting.
The outcomes
Governed on both sides of the boundary
Speed to production
Provisioning and VM deployment moved to automated provisioning and infrastructure as code, cutting delivery from a manual request cycle to a same-day operation.
Baseline: Provisioning took several days and VM deployment took several hours, all manual.
Cost per outcome
Higher infrastructure utilization on the consolidated platform and broader automation coverage across provisioning, patching, backup and monitoring, with cloud cost management and resource scheduling in place.
Baseline: Low utilization on ageing hardware, minimal automation, rising hardware maintenance and cloud operating costs.
Control and sovereignty
Cloud governance at enterprise standard, a single operational dashboard across Azure, AWS and on-premises, and regulated, latency-bound and manufacturing-integrated workloads retained on-premises by design.
Baseline: Limited cloud governance, multiple management tools and limited workload portability.
Risk reduced
Higher application availability, automated disaster recovery and governed backup with monitored success rates and an immutable repository, plus vulnerability management and encryption in transit and at rest.
Baseline: Manual disaster recovery, backup failures and availability gaps on ageing infrastructure.
The path not taken
Refresh the old estate, or move the fragmentation to the cloud
Without this program, the realistic path was to keep refreshing the aging virtualization and legacy compute and storage in place and absorb the maintenance cost as capacity limits tightened.
The alternative was an ungoverned cloud migration run in house, which would have moved the fragmentation rather than removed it, and left the regulated, latency-bound and manufacturing-integrated workloads without a home.
What's next
A platform that can absorb what comes next
The outcome is a resilient hybrid cloud platform with standardized operations, enhanced security and a scalable foundation for future innovation, with elastic infrastructure for growth and flexible workload placement across Azure and AWS.
This applies to global manufacturers and life sciences organisations carrying an estate assembled through acquisitions and refreshes, where regulatory, latency or manufacturing constraints mean a full public cloud move is not available and both sides of the estate have to be modernized together.
