The National Lottery relies on our Azure Arc solution for their hybrid cloud

Managing your IT environment? That takes quite a bit of work. Especially if you're running virtual machines both in the cloud and on-premises, like the National Lottery. Luckily, Azure Arc offers a much simpler solution. With it, businesses can now easily manage all of their virtual machines in their entire infrastructure. Wondering how that works? We're more than happy to tell you all about it!

Most people know the National Lottery from the scratch cards and games of chance, but their business goes a whole lot further. Through the countless contributions of their players, they want to make a real difference in our society: by supporting social initiatives and making dreams come true. But in order to bring that mission to a successful conclusion, they embarked on their journey to the cloud quite some time ago.

What were their expectations?

“Our cloud solutions are managed by different partners,” says Fabrice Laruelle, Infrastructure & Operations Delivery Manager at the National Lottery. “Our business infrastructure, which supports our games and operations, consists of both on-prem servers and servers in the cloud (IaaS and PaaS). And to simplify and standardize its management, we were looking for a new managed service partner.”

That's when they first got in touch with us, via Cronos Public Services. Ken Kenis, our Azure Architect, and Nicolas Geudens, Managing Partner of Hybridge, started working right away.

Smoother VM Management with Azure Arc

“In the initial phase, we adopted the National Lottery's cloud environment as-is. And shortly after that, we started an optimization process,” says Ken. “Afterwards, it became clear pretty quickly that they needed a uniform solution to manage their hybrid cloud.” So, Azure Arc was a perfect fit for them.

The bridge between on-prem and the cloud

To best manage the National Lottery's hybrid infrastructure, we installed Azure Arc on their on-prem servers. By doing so, we could both ensure that their entire environment was visible in Azure and easily apply all of our cloud services to the rest of their IT infrastructure.

And that has several benefits:

• They’re able to implement security tools on all their virtual machines, in a consistent way
• They’re managing their entire hybrid infrastructure from a single central dashboard in Microsoft Azure
• They can monitor their environment more smoothly. And apply the Azure Governance best practices everywhere.

"No-one ever wins alone"

Just like countless players could count on support from the National Lottery, they could count on ours. Because now, with their new Azure Arc solution and optimized infrastructure, they can reap the full benefits of their hybrid corporate environment. And thanks to our support, they're able to continously offer a secure and responsible gaming platform, which they greatly appreciate.

“Ken has played an essential role in this project”, says Fabrice. “He had the right knowhow to support us during the migrations. And has helped us find an innovative way to manage our infrastructure more efficiently.”

Also interested in Azure Arc?

Our cloud experts are more than happy to take a look at your hybrid or multi-cloud environment. Together we'll find the right solution for your organization.