KPMG Netherlands adapts faster to shifting business needs with flexible cloud environment

OverviewCustomer: KPMG NetherlandsCustomer website: www.kpmg.nlCustomer size: 3,000 employeesCountry or region: NetherlandsIndustry: Professional services

Customer profileKPMG is one of the largest audit, tax, and advisory services companies in the world, employing 162,000 people in 155 countries. KPMG Netherlands is one of 140 KPMG subsidiaries, with 3,000 employees.

Business situationThe company is shifting its culture and strategy to adapt more quickly to changing world financial markets and business cycles. To do that, it needs a more responsive IT infrastructure.

SolutionTo give the business faster access to IT resources, KPMG switched to a Microsoft cloud strategy and moved to a pay-per-use cost model that better matches the company’s cyclic IT needs.

Benefits Achieve hybrid cloud flexibility Reduce IT management costs through

extensive automation Trim infrastructure costs Increase business agility

“By moving to a Microsoft cloud environment, we’ll gain the ability to implement pay-per-use cost efficiencies in scaling server capacity up and down as needs change.”

Arnold van der Veen Meerstadt, IT Program Manager, KPMG Netherlands

Thousands of businesses look to KPMG for financial counsel as they navigate global markets. To better accommodate constantly evolving business needs, KPMG is embracing hybrid cloud computing using Microsoft technologies. KPMG Netherlands is an early adopter of Microsoft private cloud technologies and also plans to move workloads to Microsoft Azure. With a hybrid cloud approach, KPMG can meet a range of business needs, deploy resources much faster, reduce costs, and better control IT resources.

Adapt fasterKPMG is one of the largest professional services companies in the world, providing audit, tax, and financial advisory services to some of the biggest names in global business. KPMG operates through 140 subsidiaries that collectively employ 162,000 professionals. These professionals help customers navigate a global financial and business landscape that is constantly shifting.

“Most of our customers look to us to help them stay abreast of the financial rules and regulations in the countries where they operate,” says Eric van den Broek, Chief Information Officer at KPMG Netherlands, one of the company’s subsidiaries. “We’re transforming our culture and strategy to adapt faster to changing markets.”

Tactically, this “adapt faster” strategy involves setting up new offices, acquiring companies, deploying new software solutions, equipping staff with mobile technologies, and many other activities. Just about all require IT support, and getting the necessary infrastructure set up fast enough was proving to be a roadblock to business agility.

“If, for example, we hire 500 people next month, we in IT have to be able to support them,” says Arnold van der Veen Meerstadt, Program Manager supporting the KPMG Netherlands IT organization. “During tax season and audits, we perform big data–caliber analyses that temporarily demand massive amounts of compute power. It was very difficult to adapt quickly to these types of needs with our existing datacenter model.”

Like most KPMG subsidiaries, KPMG Netherlands operates its own IT infrastructure with guidance from KPMG. KPMG Netherlands has two datacenters that run in active-active mode, meaning that both run production servers (virtual machines), and both replicate virtual machines between the two locations for

disaster protection. While KPMG Netherlands had virtualized its servers using VMware software and used Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to monitor its datacenters, it did not have the level of process automation needed to respond to business needs as quickly as it wanted. Sometimes, instead of waiting weeks for IT to deploy servers for them, business teams procured their own servers directly from public cloud providers, without IT involvement.

Chart phased path to the cloud To keep IT resources under central governance and improve IT agility, KPMG Global made a strategic decision to transition the company to cloud computing using Microsoft cloud software and services. Its goal was to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy whereby some applications and data reside in private clouds in KPMG datacenters and some in Microsoft Azure, a cloud platform for creating and running applications in Microsoft datacenters.

“As a financial services firm, we currently need to keep some customer data in our own datacenters, but we see increasing opportunity to move more applications and data to public cloud environments,” van den Broek says. “Microsoft is already one of our key vendors, and we feel that its technologies offer better integration across private and public cloud environments and are more cost-effective than other options.”

Because KPMG Netherlands operates out of the KPMG headquarters office, it was selected to be an early implementer of a Microsoft-based private cloud and pioneer the move to Azure. KPMG Netherlands engaged Inovativ, its longtime IT services consultant, to help with its cloud transition. A member of the Microsoft Partner Network, Inovativ has extensive expertise in System Center and cloud computing.

Inovativ helped KPMG Netherlands come up with a three-stage path to a hybrid cloud environment: implement System

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“We’re transforming our culture and strategy to adapt faster to changing markets.”

Eric van den Broek, Chief Information Officer, KPMG Netherlands

Center 2012 R2 more fully, migrate from VMware to the Hyper-V virtualization technology included in the Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system, and gradually move workloads to Azure. “Our whole environment was designed around VMware, and Inovativ helped us re-architect our storage platform to work with Hyper-V,” says van der Veen Meerstadt. “The professionals at Inovativ also helped us deploy additional System Center components, use them to automate processes, and ensure that our private cloud design aligned with Microsoft best practices.”

KPMG Netherlands set up 24 host servers between its two datacenters, all running Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. It migrated 300 virtual machines from VMware to Hyper-V and configured the virtual machines as a single private cloud. During the migration, VMware-based servers sat alongside the Hyper-V environment, and the IT staff used System Center to manage both. The private cloud hardware foundation consists of Cisco Unified Computing System blade servers, Nexus switches, and a NetApp storage area network.

KPMG next will migrate its VMware virtual machines to Hyper-V and continue to run all applications on-premises, between the two datacenters, using Hyper-V Replica to replicate virtual machines between the two locations. As its datacenter hardware ages, KPMG Netherlands will move more workloads to Azure and consider decommissioning one or both of its datacenters.

“In the near future, Azure will replace certain parts of our datacenters and may eventually make them obsolete,” says van der Veen Meerstadt. “We are teaming with KPMG Global to get a corporate subscription to Azure, where we might first move our development and test environment. We also see Azure as perfect for workloads that need capacity for short

amounts of time, such as processing large data volumes.”

Reduce IT management costs with extensive automationKPMG Netherlands already used System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager to monitor its environment and the Configuration Manager component to deploy software. With help from Inovativ, it also implemented System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager to automate virtual machine provisioning, Orchestrator to create automation runbooks, and Service Manager to automate change and IT issue management.

“Employees use the Service Manager/Cireson portal to submit their IT help-desk tickets, and we’ve connected Service Manager with our problem management system so that we can do root-cause analysis of issues to get progressively smarter in our responses and eliminate problems,” says Remy van Vlokhoven, Service Manager for Infrastructure at KPMG Netherlands.

KPMG Netherlands is also investigating the use of Windows Azure Pack to enable self-service virtual machine provisioning for developers. Windows Azure Pack is a set of tools consistent with Azure that simplifies the deployment of a private cloud.

“We can use Windows Azure Pack to help us continue our push for automation and enable do-it-yourself resource provisioning for our employees,” says van der Veen Meerstadt. “With Microsoft cloud automation tools, we’ll be able to expand our datacenter resources without expanding our IT staff very much. We can also use our staff more effectively.”

Trim hardware, software costsCost savings extend to datacenter infrastructure. With its private cloud environment, KPMG Netherlands can make far more effective use of servers than it did with a purely virtualized environment. “By

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moving to a Microsoft cloud environment, we’ll gain the ability to implement pay-per-use cost efficiencies in scaling server capacity up and down as needs change,” says van der Veen Meerstadt. “We currently don’t charge business units for their IT resources, but we’ll soon be able to do that, which will make business teams accountable for their IT resource usage. Mostly, we won’t have a bunch of servers sitting around unused most of the year. We’ll spin up virtual machines when needed and decommission and reallocate them to other workloads when they’re no longer needed.”

In addition, with the move from VMware to Hyper-V, which is included in Windows Server 2012 R2 licensing, KPMG Netherlands will save approximately US$90,000 annually in VMware licensing fees.

Increase business agilityMost importantly, KPMG Netherlands will end up with a datacenter environment that can flex and adjust to business needs almost instantaneously. “No one wants to wait anymore—even a day is too long,” says van der Veen Meerstadt. “Sometimes our business teams need a response from IT in a couple of hours. The self-service concept that we can realize with Microsoft hybrid cloud computing will make everyone’s life better. Automation helps us eliminate mistakes, too, and avoid rework. We’ll have a more consistent environment that’s easier to maintain.”

With the IT organization able to deliver servers as quickly as business teams need them, those teams won’t be tempted to circumvent IT and acquire servers from outside providers. “With our hybrid cloud environment, we can create an organization-wide policy that unites all of our cloud activities to ensure that company data is safe,” says van Vlokhoven. “We are audited several times a year and need to be able to account for all of our servers. With

central control of both internal and Azure-based servers, we can do that.”Other KPMG subsidiaries have been watching KPMG Netherlands move to the cloud and are ready to follow suit. “We are showing our sister subsidiaries that cloud computing is working great and saving us money,” says van der Veen Meerstadt. “With our Microsoft cloud environment, we are ready for the future.”

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“The self-service concept that we can realize with Microsoft hybrid cloud computing will make everyone’s life better. Automation helps us eliminate mistakes, too, and avoid rework. We’ll have a more consistent environment that’s easier to maintain.”

Arnold van der Veen Meerstadt, IT Project Manager, KPMG Netherlands

Transform the datacenterWith Windows Server, Microsoft System Center, and Microsoft Azure, customers can take advantage of an enterprise-grade platform across the on-premises datacenter and the cloud. Consistency between the datacenter and the cloud makes it easier to integrate new capabilities. With datacenter innovation and new hybrid options, you can reduce costs, simplify management, and access cloud resources on demand.

For more information about transforming the datacenter, go to:www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/cloud-os/modern-data-center.aspx

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This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published June 2015

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft Azure− Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter− Microsoft System Center 2012 R2

Technologies− Hyper-V

Hardware Cisco Unified Computing System Nexus switches NetApp storage area network

Partners Inovativ

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For more information about Inovativ products and services, visit the website at: www.inovativ.nl

For more information about KPMG Netherlands, visit the website at: www.kpmg.nl