Waste management company migrates 300 servers to Azure

Founded in 1912, Biffa has grown to be the UK’s leading integrated waste management company, registering turnover of £1 billion. In need of a scalable platform to aid growth, Biffa undertook a migration of its approximately 300 servers to the Microsoft Azure cloud.

According to Biffa Head of IT Services and Security Stephen Graham: “Biffa grows a lot by acquisition, so we need to expand quite rapidly. In the space of a year we took everything that we could and put it in Azure. I'm proud to say at this point now we're 100 per cent cloud.”

With 10 acquisitions in 2018, Biffa’s move to the cloud has helped it seamlessly onboard new users. As Graham says: “We've had issues before where we want to onboard a large number of users, and we just didn't have the capacity to do that. The cloud just means that you can add people quickly and they're able to just get on with their day job from day one.”

Migrating to Azure has enabled Biffa to unlock a range of features, whilst saving 25 per cent on costs and driving efficiencies with the company’s use of data. A key benefit has been the integration of different technologies, with Graham saying: “It was key to us that our non-Microsoft systems could exist in Azure, notably some of our legacy systems which run on different flavours of UNIX and Linux. Those were freely available in Azure as they would be on really what was some very expensive tin sat in our data center.”

Sales Director Darren King, meanwhile points out how Azure has enabled Biffa to innovate through data: “Data is probably the thing that gives us the most ability to generate value for our customers whilst at the same time protecting our margins as a business.” Overall, King says, Azure “gives us a real opportunity to dominate in this market […] It just puts us into a different league compared to some of our competitors, and I’m excited about what’s to come.”