How Cloud Adoption Helped Batory Foods Reduce Costs and Improve Performance

Founded in 1979, Batory Foods has provided high-quality food ingredients for food and beverage manufacturers throughout the United States. Over the past twenty years, Batory’s portfolio of offerings have greatly increased and led to the development of a national system of warehouses and distribution centers that use logistics principles to quickly and efficiently deliver products to their customers.

As Batory’s market reach and product lines expanded, they needed to better understand how to improve their business processes.  They spent a great deal of time and effort analyzing and assessing to better understand how to further optimize their operations. They were also dealing with aging IT infrastructure and were trying to identify whether to continue investing in their data center or migrate workloads to the cloud.

Batory previously adopted cloud-based solutions piecemeal for specific needs, but they struggled with performance issues and a disappointing user experience. They knew they wanted to leverage the cloud, but they needed a trusted advisor to guide them through the transition.

Teaming Together for Success

BDO Digital was already collaborating with Batory on several IT and infrastructure projects that included a WAN resiliency and redundancy solution, Azure strategy roadmap, security hardening initiatives, a DR migration from a SunGard co-located solution to an Azure cloud solution and a new warehouse management infrastructure deployment.  The Batory Foods IT team was also performing an ERP migration from a legacy, on-premise Great Plaines solution to a Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution running in the cloud. Along with these strategic initiatives, the relationship the VP of Technology, Lisa LoGiudice, and Director of Information Technology, Jesse Chavez, built with the BDO team allowed Batory's operations to continuously evolve as technology changed.

As next steps, the BDO Digital team performed a cloud economic assessment and created a tailored Azure cloud architecture roadmap which included requirements to address infrastructure scaling, resiliency and performance challenges while still ensuring an exceptional user experience.

Cloud Adoption Has Made a Huge Impact

Cloud technology is redefining business models, changing employee behavior, and improving the customer experience. BDO Digital assisted Batory Foods in capturing the full power of the cloud by increasing operational efficiencies in the following ways:

• Cost Savings: By moving from a legacy co-located solution to a cloud-managed platform, Batory is significantly reducing their spend on costs related to data centers, hardware, licensing, support, and monitoring.
• Infrastructure Improvements: The Azure solution allows for faster and less expensive scaling of infrastructure to handle any amount of organizational growth. Additionally, the cloud has increased visibility and control of infrastructure through centralization of management capabilities and allowed Batory to categorize and organize infrastructure costs by departments or usage.
• Improved Performance: The Azure solution improved performance by immediately providing instant optimization capabilities.
• Disaster Recovery: Before moving to the cloud, Batory was paying for a disaster recovery solution that was very costly to maintain and didn’t offer comprehensive protection. After cloud adoption, Batory now has additional disaster recovery capabilities and faster disaster recovery response times.

Cloud Adoption Provided a Competitive Advantage in Times of Disruption

As the COVID-19 pandemic moved throughout the country and many states imposed stay at home orders, Batory was able to quickly react and transition to a work from home model. The cloud was already in place and disruption was minimized as employees were already prepared to use the cloud remotely.

Moving Forward

Batory is continuing to focus efforts on identifying further workloads that can be migrated to the cloud as well as furthering their security posture for all integrated systems. This is critical to ensure the protection of their workforce, customers and vendors. Batory is continuing to work with BDO Digital to explore further security solutions such as Azure Sentinel and Intune to provide governance, secure adaptive access and unified identify management. BDO Digital is continuing to partner with Batory Foods to ensure their technology continually drives operational efficiency and growth to allow for their business to grow and expand.