Case study
IIS rehost to Azure case study
The client is a manufacturing company with roughly 350 employees. Name and location withheld — the stack, the approach, and the numbers are real.
The situation
The client runs a decade-old, custom-built line-of-business application handling production scheduling, inventory, and order processing — the software that actually keeps the shop floor running. It lived on Windows Server 2012 R2 with IIS 8.5 and a SQL Server 2012 database, hosted on VMware with local SAN storage.
The application itself was stable and doing its job well; nobody was asking for new features. The real problem was underneath it — aging hardware, limited disaster recovery, and maintenance costs that kept climbing as the equipment got harder to support.
Before and after
The stack, side by side.
| Layer | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Server | Windows Server 2012 R2, VMware with local SAN | Azure Virtual Machines |
| Application | Custom LOB app — scheduling, inventory, order processing | Same application, no code changes |
| Database | SQL Server 2012, on-premises | Azure SQL Managed Instance |
| Resilience | Local SAN, limited disaster recovery | Azure Backup and Site Recovery, Network Security Groups |
The approach
Since the application worked well and didn't need new features or a rewrite, rehosting was the clear fit — the server and hardware were the actual liability, not the code. The existing virtual machines were migrated to Azure with no application changes: the same production scheduling system, the same inventory logic, the same order processing, just running on modern infrastructure.
The database moved to Azure SQL Managed Instance. Azure Backup and Site Recovery were added to close the disaster-recovery gap the on-premises setup never really had, and Network Security Groups were put in place to control access to the new environment. The whole migration was scoped into a single planned maintenance window rather than a multi-day project.
The result
The aging-hardware risk is gone, and getting there didn't require a new capital hardware purchase. Disaster recovery — genuinely limited before — is now handled by Azure Backup and Site Recovery instead of a single local SAN. The cutover itself happened in one planned maintenance window with minimal disruption to the shop floor.
Just as important, the company now has a cloud foundation it can modernize incrementally later — nothing about this migration forecloses a future rebuild if the application ever does need to change. For now, it runs exactly as it did, just without the hardware clock ticking underneath it.
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