BITSUMMIT migrated and modernized 200+ of FCL's legacy applications to Azure with minimal downtime, improving performance, security, and cost efficiency.
Federated Co-operatives Limited serves more than 160 member retail co-ops across Western Canada, and a large part of that business still ran on legacy applications hosted on-premises on operating systems as old as Windows Server 2008. Out of support, those systems no longer received vendor patches, which left known security holes open. They were also unreliable, carrying the downtime and maintenance overhead that aging infrastructure brings, and most of it was poorly documented, so even managing or troubleshooting the estate was harder than it should have been.
FCL knew it needed to modernize to stay competitive, improve security, and bring operating costs down. The hard part was that these were not peripheral systems: the applications were tied into supply chain, inventory management, and point-of-sale operations across the co-op network, so any migration had to move more than 200 of them with as little disruption as possible to a business that runs every day.
FCL's core retail and wholesale systems were still running on out-of-support platforms like Windows Server 2008, undocumented and tightly coupled to supply chain, inventory, and point-of-sale operations across more than 160 member co-ops. Moving over 200 of those applications to Azure meant rebuilding the foundation first and migrating against a real dependency map rather than guesswork.
Inventory and map before moving
BITSUMMIT inventoried every legacy application and server across the retail and wholesale divisions and mapped the dependencies between applications, databases, and services, then documented the environment from assessments and interviews with FCL's IT staff. On a previously undocumented estate, that work is what made a low-risk migration possible and surfaced the risks worth planning around.
Build a governed Azure landing zone
The destination was built to Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework: an Azure landing zone with governance policies, security controls, and compliance requirements set to FCL's needs, virtual networks, subnets, and network security groups to segment resources, and VPN gateways for secure hybrid connectivity while the migration was in flight.
Modernize and migrate the workloads
Applications were refactored for Azure where it made sense and containerized with Docker on Azure Kubernetes Service for easier deployment and scaling. On-premises SQL Server databases moved to Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance using the Azure Database Migration Service for minimal downtime, with rigorous data-integrity and performance testing confirming each one came across clean and faster.
Control cost from day one
To keep cloud spend from drifting, BITSUMMIT right-sized VM sizes and service tiers, enabled auto-scaling for variable workloads, and used Azure Reserved VM Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit to bring the rate down. Azure Cost Management dashboards, budgets, and alerts keep spending visible and bounded.
Harden and govern
Azure Security Center and Microsoft Defender provide threat protection, Azure Key Vault secures application secrets and certificates, and Azure Policy enforces standards and measures compliance at scale, with the environment aligned to PCI DSS and SOC 2.
Hand it over
Workshops trained FCL's IT staff to run Azure day to day, and full documentation, including architecture diagrams, configurations, and operational procedures, left the team able to operate and extend the platform themselves.
BITSUMMIT migrated over 200 legacy applications and databases to Azure with downtime held under 2% of operational hours, and the modernized architectures are easier to maintain and scale than the systems they replaced.
Performance and reliability both improved on the new foundation: application performance rose 40% and unplanned downtime fell by 50%. Retiring the unsupported operating systems closed off a class of vulnerabilities outright, and Azure's security tooling cut security incidents by a further 60%. Right-sizing, reserved instances, and tighter resource use reduced operational costs by 30% and removed the capital expense of refreshing and maintaining on-premises hardware. FCL can now provision resources quickly for new initiatives, absorb peak loads through auto-scaling, and let its IT team focus on strategic work instead of keeping aging servers alive.
Tell us what you're trying to modernize, secure or migrate. We'll bring a plan and a named senior engineer.
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