Mensura combines the private cloud with the public cloud

The Mensura Group operates in the field of prevention, safety, and health at work and also offers solutions for structurally and sustainably tackling absenteeism. IT plays an important role here. CIO Gerrit Van Daele: “Mensura chose an agile IT attuned to the needs of the business.” It not only focuses on infrastructure and the cloud but also on digital workplace, security, and collaboration. As a partner, Proximus has a key role to play in each area.

We choose cloud-first. With Cloud Fusion, we reduce the investment in in-house hardware. This leaves room to invest elsewhere.

Gerrit Van Daele, CIO at Mensura

From capex to opex

More and more of the IT systems Mensura uses to support its employees run in the cloud. Gerrit: “We chose cloud-first. In the past, we invested a great deal in our own hardware. Getting that budget down creates more room to invest elsewhere.”

Phased migration of 119 applications to the cloud

Proximus’ Cloud Fusion is the solution Mensura uses to put that strategy into practice. Mia Herzeel, Product Owner at Proximus: “To put it simply, Cloud Fusion is the umbrella name for our hybrid cloud solutions that combine the advantages of both the public and private clouds.” Proximus has migrated precisely 119 applications from Mensura to Cloud Fusion. Mia: “Naturally, we did this step by step, initially with a proof of concept and a pilot project; first for development, then for validation and production.”

Transparent overview of capacity and costs

Cloud Fusion provides Mensura with a solution comparable to what is possible in a public cloud such as Microsoft Azure, an environment that can easily be scaled according to business needs. A dashboard provides a clear view of the capacity used and the associated costs. Mia: “When you set up a new virtual machine, you see its associated budget right away.” This allows Mensura to manage costs easily. “For example, it helps your company to avoid paying for virtual machines in the cloud that are actually no longer used.”

A dashboard provides a clear view of the cloud capacity used and the associated costs. It helps your company to avoid paying for virtual machines in the cloud that are no longer used.

Mia Herzeel, Product Owner at Proximus

Single pane of glass

Gerrit: “It’s very important for us that Cloud Fusion gives us an overview of our entire IT environment. That single pane of glass is very important to us.” This is because not everything is in the cloud yet, despite it providing so many services. “We can’t go to the cloud with all applications right away. For example, it’s not possible for our core application.”

DevOps

Mensura still manages to achieve a higher degree of flexibility even with applications that are not yet cloudready. Hence the company is fully committed to DevOps, an approach that bundles the development and management of an application. Gerrit: “We are committed to automation as much as possible. That also allows us to switch very quickly around these applications, so they can evolve much more smoothly according to business needs.”