The NMS video division maintains a mission-critical custom supply chain application that is used every day by distribution partners to enable global content management and fulfillment. It is essential that this application is always available. “A large percentage of our revenue goes through our supply chain system, so we can’t let that application go down at any time,” says Mike Gassner, the organization’s senior vice president of technology solutions. The company was looking to enhance its disaster recovery capabilities, because the application was running on two Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 database software nodes in a data center. “Both nodes were located in the data center, so if the data center was ever impacted, we knew the application would be impacted too,” Gassner says.

NMS was also looking to further enhance performance in its SQL Server environment. “We have very high I/O demands for our supply chain application, and it was getting more difficult to meet those requirements as more customers started to use it,” says Gassner. The company also needed the flexibility to scale up or down to support application usage spikes. “Every six months, we have spikes in traffic volume, and we needed to buy more hardware just to meet the demands during those periods,” says Gassner. “Unfortunately, the hardware was sitting idle the rest of the year.”

As it sought to address its investment in innovation and overall infrastructure strategy for the coming years, it made sense for NMS to move all its SQL Server–based applications to the cloud along with the rest of its applications. “We were at the point where we were going to have to refresh all our hardware, so it was the right time to think about what a fully cloud-based solution looks like for our industry,” says Gassner.