Success Story

Cloud Consulting for eCargo

When their data centre provider announced its closure, eCargo needed to migrate to the public cloud. They sought Dynamo6’s expert guidance on Google Cloud Platform to validate their architecture and solve complex technical challenges, ensuring their migration was a success from day one.

Services

  • Digital Consultancy
  • Cloud Services

Deliverables

  • Google Cloud Platform Engineering
  • Technology Advisory

eCargo, a division of Oji Fibre Solutions, provides a critical SaaS freight management platform for some of New Zealand’s biggest brands, including Foodstuffs and Countdown. When their traditional data centre provider announced its closure, it created a trigger point to move to the public cloud.

After a proof-of-concept phase revealed that other cloud providers couldn't deliver the required disk performance for their virtual machine workloads, eCargo selected Google Cloud Platform. However, their primary goal was to have complete visibility and control over their own environment. They needed a partner who could act as an expert sounding board, validate their design decisions, and help solve tricky technical problems without taking over the project.

Our approach

  • 01

    Foundational Design & Validation

    Our engagement began by acting as a strategic sounding board. We didn't just offer advice; we dove into the technical details. A key outcome of this phase was our recommendation to completely rebuild their authorisation model. Based on our experience, we designed a more robust and secure model, which would have been difficult to correct if implemented from the outset.

  • 02

    Solving Complex Technical Problems

    When your system is a crucial part of New Zealand’s supply chain, getting it right the first time is essential. We provided deep technical expertise across a range of critical areas, from advising on core networking, identity management, and structuring firewalls, to guiding decisions on optimal instance speeds and planning for robust disaster recovery strategies, including comprehensive backups and snapshots. Furthermore, our team helped eCargo overcome challenges with implementing crucial audit logging, providing a working solution and a plan for the ongoing support of the platform, thereby saving them significant time and ensuring operational excellence.

  • 03

    Empowering the eCargo Team

    Our goal was to give the eCargo team the "headstart they needed" to manage their own environment. We provided specific advice on best practices for backups, firewalls, identity management, and networking. This collaborative approach gave them the confidence to take control of their own destiny and run with the project themselves.

The results

This short and sweet engagement delivered immense value, giving eCargo the assurance they needed to complete their cloud migration successfully.

  • A More Secure & Robust Foundation: Our expert guidance on the authorisation model from day one ensured their environment was built on a secure and scalable foundation, preventing costly future remediation.

  • Accelerated Problem-Solving: By tapping into our team's deep GCP expertise, eCargo was able to solve complex technical problems around disaster recovery and audit logging far more quickly than if they had to learn it all themselves.

  • Full Control & Visibility: The partnership empowered eCargo to achieve their primary goal: complete control over their own environment, with no third parties to manage for change requests. This has enabled them to build and control their own DR solution and plan for future enhancements, such as moving to a different geo-location for even greater resilience.

  • Improved Performance at a Lower Cost: The move to GCP has resulted in slightly lower workload costs while providing faster hardware, leading to a better and more responsive experience for eCargo's customers.

  • Dynamo6 helped us in setting up the whole thing, and from my perspective as a manager, understanding how it all hangs together and providing us with a view of the cost break-downs and so on was certainly useful.

    We wanted to jump straight into the details and solve problems and Dynamo6 were really good at doing that. It was certainly helpful getting Andy’s and Dynamo6’s expertise, it gave us the headstart that we needed. It also gave it a bit more confidence in terms of choosing and using the Google Cloud Platform. It helped to know there was a local reseller in New Zealand who had implemented other customer’s solutions and could help us.

    Tim Strawbridge

    General Manager

  • Dynamo6 really stepped up to how we wanted to work, which was good. From a technical point of view, we got quite a lot of benefits, particularly early on to get confidence that we were on the right track. In some areas, it would have taken us a long time to find and understand all the options.

    So, having people who have already worked in GCP and who are quite familiar with the environment gave us confidence in the approach we’d chosen. In some areas, if we hadn’t got it right to start with, it would have been difficult or impossible to correct, so having input from experts was really valuable. There were some tricky technical problems to solve, and Dynamo6 were able to go away and address these, which saved us a lot of time.

    Bart Joy

    Senior Software Engineer

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