ACG Fruit embarks on cloud journey with +OneX
The client
ACG Fruit focuses on citrus, grape and raisin production in the Northern Cape, Western Cape and Limpopo areas. The company cultivates about 1,300 HA of land which produces more than 2 million cartons of table grapes, 1 million cartons of citrus, 4,000 tonnes of raisins and 1,000 tonnes of wine grapes.
The challenge
Management teams at ACG’s farms and head-office need efficient, reliable technology to manage farms and export requirements. They rely on timely access to data to support growing, harvesting and logistics operations. The company had arrived at a point where it would need to procure new IT hardware to support its growing data volumes.
Rather than investing capital in new hardware, ACG wanted to explore more modern, flexible and efficient ways of provisioning storage and security. The company also recognised an opportunity to modernise its ICT infrastructure by migrating document management, business intelligence and the farm management system to the Microsoft cloud.
The solution
ACG Fruit commissioned long time Microsoft Solutions Partner, +OneX Security Services and Solutions, to migrate its network and server resources to the Microsoft Azure cloud. The objective was to enhance security, enable more efficient data management and backup, simplify data and network access, and enable team members to collaborate from any location. ACG Fruit had over a terabyte of data that needed to be moved from physical servers to Microsoft Azure. This required careful planning to minimise disruption and ensure no data was lost.
Business value achieved
The project has achieved its key goals: making it easier for teams to collaborate; enabling anytime and anywhere access to data; optimising security; and creating a flexible, scalable and cost-optimised infrastructure that can grow with and adapt to ACG’s evolving needs. Applications can now be deployed to all users almost instantaneously and new users can be added with a click of a button.
ACG Fruit no longer needs to worry about hardware warranties, and capital costing and budgeting issues have been relegated to the past. Collaboration has been enhanced to include not only documents, but also teamwork and video conferencing via Microsoft Teams. What’s more, the cloud-based model means that occasional network and hardware issues no longer bring productivity to a halt.
Basil Karstel
Business Intelligence Manager, ACG Fruit
We're seeing far better collaboration and communication thanks to our new integrated environment and we have far more control over user access, and overall security with better tools at our fingertips. ”