About Rural Brasil
Rural Brasil, a leading Brazilian agribusiness company in the distribution of agricultural inputs, sells: pesticides, fertilizers, foliar nutrition programs, and top-quality seeds. It operates in more than 220 municipalities, specifically in the states of Goiás, Mato Grosso, Tocantins, Maranhão, and Pará, with 33 branches.
It is worth noting that the company has been part of the AgroGalaxy Group—one of Brazil’s largest agricultural conglomerates—since 2016. It operates in various stages of the production chain (production and distribution of agricultural inputs, technical assistance services, grain storage and processing, and the trading of agricultural commodities).
Challenge
In mid-2014, Rural Brasil was facing issues with the performance of its systems, as well as high maintenance costs for its legacy servers, which were running outdated operating systems and applications, thereby compromising information security. In addition, the company had difficulty scaling its infrastructure to meet business demand, which hindered the company’s expansion goals and the quality of service provided to its customers.
“Our partnership began in 2014 and continues to this day. We see in add it Cloud Solutions the unique ability to treat each client and their specific needs with care, with a commitment to ensuring our operations are always available, without interruptions, while remaining flexible in every aspect of the partnership. Another important aspect of our partnership was the migration to the cloud, which they managed seamlessly without our users or clients noticing any issues; it was a 100% transparent migration—unbelievable,” said Eduardo Tavares, IT Director.
Solution
Due to the high costs of maintaining an on-premises environment, Rural sought alternatives in the market and decided to migrate its servers to a 100% private cloud. This environment provided the necessary resources for virtualization, automation, monitoring, and comprehensive infrastructure management, giving the company full control and flexibility over its environment, along with a significant improvement in security.
"We chose add it Cloud Solutions because Rural was looking for a partner who could solve its biggest priority, the performance of mission-critical applications in the cloud." Comments Eduardo Tavares
In addition to SECURITY, of course, a solution for Business Continuity was essential, which is why we contracted add it to provide the DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) solution, which consists of replicating servers, data, and applications from the private cloud to a secondary cloud in another region, ensuring business continuity in the event of natural disasters, cyberattacks, or technical failures. To address this challenge, a disaster recovery plan was created and documented, in which we defined, together with the client, the strategies, policies, and procedures for preventing, responding to, and recovering systems in the event of a disaster. This DRaaS plan took into account the types of possible disasters, the impact on the business, the most critical resources to be protected, and the timeframes for restoring normal operations.
Results
A key success factor in this project can be summed up in a single word: PLANNING. This phase involved assessing business needs, objectives, resources and risks.
The migration to the cloud, as well as the implementation of the DRaaS service, were carried out after extensive planning and in phases, following a project plan developed by Rural’s IT team in partnership with the consulting team at add it Cloud Solutions.
The result was a success, bringing many benefits:
- Increased application performance, eliminating slowdowns and crashes caused by obsolete equipment;
- Reduced operating and maintenance costs for servers, making better use of available resources and avoiding expenditure on hardware, energy and physical space;
- More data and information security, using encryption, a firewall and an efficient data protection solution, as well as following the company's compliance rules;
- Greater scalability of the infrastructure, being able to increase or decrease server capacity according to demand, without affecting the service provided to customers;
- Greater agility and productivity for the IT team, as the entire server infrastructure is managed by add it's team of specialists.
- Greater resilience and recovery of data and applications, with the DRaaS service that guarantees rapid restoration of services in the event of interruptions.
- “We at Rural Brasil are very pleased with the outcome of the migration and with our adoption of the DRaaS service, and we plan to expand to other projects in the future. The 100% private cloud from add it Cloud Solutions has proven to be a efficient, secure, and extremely reliable solution for management and disaster protection,” concluded Eduardo Tavares.
