The challenge

Ageing hardware

When we first started working with the team at Ace Rental Cars, they had ageing hardware and wanted to migrate to the cloud to avoid a large capital expenditure on new hardware.

Cloud migration

With limited internal resource, Lancom Technology was chosen to migrate Ace Rental Car’s workloads to the cloud and to help guide them on how best to leverage the opportunities presented by the cloud. Namely enhanced levels of scalability, security, innovation and affordability.

Optimising the cloud

Once in the cloud, Ace Car Rentals wanted support optimising their environments and leveraging the tools available to them.

The solution

Lift and shift

Our teams worked to migrate Ace Car Rentals off their ageing hardware, and away from a New Zealand based data centre, and into the public cloud. As well as hardware like servers, this also included Ace’s public facing websites that are used for everything booking related. The team carried out detailed planning and implemented the move with no disruption to users or customers.

Scalable computer power and storage

With the client’s version of Citrix approaching end of life, our team rolled out an upgrade that allowed an integration with the public cloud API, enabling the ability to scale up and down depending on need. This means the client only pays for the compute power and storage space they need.

Microsoft Office 365

Next, to get Ace Car Rental’s off their old email exchange server, our team migrated them to Office 365. This removed the need to manage an on-premise email server whilst also letting users access their emails remotely and from any device.

Cloud managed services

Our team helped transition Ace Car Rentals across to a cloud managed services contract. This sees our team continuing to make optimisations to the client’s environment to support scaling and further reducing their cost footprint.

The results

Increased stability and resilience

With emails hosted on Microsoft Office 365, their published desktop on Citrix and their websites on public cloud, our client has much greater stability and resilience within their IT environment and there is no need to manage hardware.

Reduced costs

Migrating away from ageing hardware has meant capital expenditure savings and reduced costs by mitigating the need to invest upfront in new hardware. With the cloud-based model of paying monthly, the client benefits from transparent billing and predictable budgeting.

Greater flexibility

When COVID hit people suddenly weren’t hiring cars. Our team were able to turn off any excess virtual machines, reducing costly compute power and ensuring the appropriate level of elasticity.

Strategic partnership

During the time we have been supporting Ace Car Rentals, they have been acquired by Hertz. Hertz has worked to integrate their car rental businesses and because of our partnership approach, our team has been able to use their intimate site knowledge to assist the client with transitioning both IT hardware and cloud infrastructure where needed. Saving time, money and creating a more resilient and joined up IT environment.