From legacy lock-in to cloud innovation in just six weeks

In six weeks, Appvia migrated JJFoods to Azure - avoiding costly renewals, accelerating development and restarting their stalled R&D project.

£500k

Forecasted savings

30%

Infrastructure savings

15 %

IT spend reduced
Solution
Migration & Modernisation
Cloud provider
Azure
Location
UK
Industry
Retail
Project duration
6 weeks

Challenge

JJ Foods needed to retire its on-premise infrastructure before a costly 6-figure VMware renewal came due. Much of the hardware and software estate had been running reliably for years but was nearing end-of-support status, making upgrades more complex.

Beyond the looming renewal fee, the manual processes underpinning the environment were blocking development teams, especially an R&D initiative set to save £1 million annually.

With 67% of servers soon to be unsupported, the organisation faced a high-stakes choice: either invest heavily in out-of-date systems or transition to a more modern, flexible solution in Azure.

How Appvia helped

Appvia guided JJ Foods through a focused migration, designed to fit the company’s tight timelines and compliance requirements. We kicked off with an Azure Migrate assessment, sizing each workload and evaluating whether it should be rehosted as-is or replatformed into containers. Critical systems such as payroll, HR, and business intelligence were moved to Azure Virtual Machines with near-zero downtime. Projects that could benefit from container orchestration were shifted to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), using Windows-based containers secured by Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSA).

Our team also introduced automated provisioning practices to replace hand-crafted scripts. By adopting Infrastructure as Code principles and building robust continuous integration and delivery pipelines, JJ Foods gained self-service capabilities for faster development.

Throughout, we provided hands-on support for the small DevOps team, ensuring knowledge transfer and reducing reliance on costly third-party resources.

Our Approach

We follow a structured five-phase approach to ensure efficient, secure, and cost-conscious cloud migrations.

1. Prepare: Clarify business goals, identify key stakeholders, plan governance, and align teams for success.

2. Assess: Evaluate current infrastructure, applications, dependencies, FinOps readiness checks, and cloud security frameworks to feed into a migration plan.

3. Plan: Define how each workload will be migrated: retain, rehost, replatform, replace, rearchitect, or retire. Define success metrics, establish communication channels and put in place the Landing zone architecture and automation.

4. Pilot: Validate the process, platform capabilities, and security by testing a representative workload.

5. Migrate: Execute the migration in waves, using automation tools and services to integrate monitoring, performance, and security. Refine estimates, provide training, and ensure teams can operate confidently post-migration.

The Outcome

Cost avoidance

Migrating within six weeks helped JJ Foods avoid a six-figure VMware renewal fee.

Long-term savings

By moving to Azure, the company projects £500k in savings over five years, including a 30% reduction in infrastructure expenses.

Reduced outsourcing

Only 15% of their IT budget now goes to third-party services, as they rely on native Azure features and in-house automation

Carbon goal

The migration aligns with JJ Foods’ plan to be carbon negative by 2030, leveraging Microsoft’s energy-efficient data centres

Accelerated innovation

Developers can now spin up resources quickly, enabling the stalled R&D project—potentially saving £1.2 million annually—to move forward without infrastructure roadblocks.

By focusing on critical workloads first and introducing modern automation, Appvia ensured JJ Foods avoided unnecessary licence costs and laid the groundwork for ongoing innovation.

The results are clear: faster development cycles, reduced infrastructure expenses, and a more agile platform that supports both day-to-day operations and ambitious R&D goals.

We continue to work alongside their internal teams, offering a point of escalation and technical guidance as they expand services, maintain compliance and keep the environment aligned with best practice standards.

Michael Dudley

Chief Technical Officer, JJ Foods

Appvia’s expertise helped us modernise in six weeks, avoiding costly renewals and unlocking long-term savings. The Azure migration reduced IT spend and accelerated our R&D, making the transition seamless and future-proof

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