Quintet Private Bank: from on-premises to Azure Cloud with delaware

A European private bank 

“Three years ago, a move to the cloud to take advantage of the services available was among the objectives in our IT strategy,” explains Eric Dognon, Head of Workplace, Mobility, and Infrastructure Service Delivery at Quintet Private Bank. “Quintet Private Bank is a leading private bank, operating in 50 cities across Europe and employing 2,000 professionals. It offers its services to high-net-worth individuals and their families, as well as institutional and professional clients, which include family offices, foundations, and third-party managers. I’m in charge of the team that looks after IT infrastructures. We work from our head office in Luxembourg, which provides services to all our group entities.” 

Moving to the Azure Cloud — a must 

Quintet Private Bank’s move to the cloud aimed in particular to improve efficiency and operations, as well as reduce costs. Dognon says, “We were well aware that moving to the cloud was a must, because more and more publishers are favoring this path and that of SaaS, and are therefore developing fewer on-prem solutions and hardware. In addition, the evolution of the Luxembourg regulatory framework made it possible to switch to the cloud, which was not the case before. And of course, we were also aware of the operational added value, thanks to which it’s no longer necessary to mobilize internal infrastructures and assume all the related management or maintenance. We launched with Microsoft 365, but very quickly worked in parallel on the Azure Cloud part.”

Once the decision was made to move forward in this new cloud environment, and more specifically with Microsoft solutions, Dognon and his teams needed expertise and support. “We chose delaware to support our cloud projects, both for Microsoft 365 and Azure. Why delaware? They were among the few partners recommended to us by Microsoft. We met with two candidates, and delaware stood out with its vision, its planning, and its pricing proposal. Its experience and in-depth expertise with Microsoft solutions were also major assets.” 

Proof of Concept, workshops, and migrations 

delaware’s Azure specialists in Luxembourg hold the seven Solutions Partner designations awarded by Microsoft, so they were up for the challenge, which was broken down into several stages. “First, delaware drew up a blueprint,” says Dognon. “This was a great assessment document on which the second part of the work was based — the creation and implementation of a landing zone. delaware completed this with a whole series of workshops, during which our teams were supported by delaware experts. They addressed all the relevant points and advised us on how to move forward. 

“Something really important for us was that everything was calibrated on the fact that we are based in several European countries, as opposed to a single local entity,” Dognon continues. “Because of this, our issues are different, and that was taken into account. Once the design was approved, our landing zone was scripted and implemented. After this component was finalized, the delaware teams also managed the transfer of knowledge, so that our administrators could take up the baton.”

Reflections and migrations

Today, moving to the Azure Cloud is more important than ever to Eric Dognon and his teams. “What's next? Based on the results of this proof of concept, we’ll analyze the environments we want to push into the cloud,” says Dognon. “What we want is a real transformation of environments to use Microsoft SaaS services. We want to avoid going into ‘lift and shift,’ which would amount to simply moving a machine from one place to another. It is this transformation that will allow us to achieve our efficiency and cost-reduction objectives."

“Deleting internal environments means that we’ll no longer have to perform maintenance and patching operations, and that there’ll be little risk of security breaches. In terms of cost reduction, this means that we’ll be able to rely on applications and the entire Microsoft environment, with servers and services that only run when we need them, rather than 24 hours a day. We therefore avoid running certain infrastructures unnecessarily, for example, a CPU. And there’s also a potential gain in operational areas, in particular no longer having to call in staff over the weekend.” 

Results that meet expectations 

Everything that’s been achieved so far has allowed Dognon to arrive at an initial assessment of the transition to the Azure Cloud: “What’s been accomplished meets our expectations. The collaboration with delaware allowed us to fully understand all the capabilities of the cloud and the value it can add. We can count on delaware not only for strategic advice, but also for implementation operations and managed services in Azure, which makes our job much easier. Once our analysis has been finalized, we can fully immerse ourselves. And we hope delaware will continue to support us, particularly with regard to governance, architecture, and cloud operations.”