Citrus Consulting Helps Redington Gulf Achieve Compliance and Improve Agility Using AWS

Redington Gulf Middle East and Africa operations (MEA) worked with Citrus Consulting to migrate its VMware-based applications to Amazon Web Services (AWS) using VMware Cloud on AWS. This enabled Redington to almost double the system performance of its VMware applications. By moving away from on-premises systems, Redington MEA has improved scalability, helped with compliance, and freed up its developers to be more productive and innovative.

Redington Gulf is a distributor of IT equipment that supports telecoms, supply chain, and logistics services. It was founded in 1999 to serve the Middle East and African (MEA) markets and is part of the Redington Group, an international technology company. Redington Gulf supplies more than 15,000 customers in 27 countries and generates over $4 billion in annual revenues.

Redington Gulf’s IT infrastructure had grown organically. It was using a mix of on-premises technologies, including VMware, and it also had several workloads running with different cloud providers. Its hybrid estate was complex to manage, inflexible, and created a budgeting headache because of the combination of capital expenditure (capex) and operating expenditure (opex).

The company first engaged with AWS Partner Citrus Consulting—a subsidiary of Redington Gulf— to help drive its transformation. The companies developed a long-term plan to migrate Redington MEA’s infrastructure and applications from on-premises to the cloud.

Redington Gulf’s core services relied on VMware hosted on premises, and the first step was to migrate these users to AWS. “Timing dictated that a technology refresh was due, otherwise we would have invested in more on-premises hardware and had to wait,” says Harsh Ramling, vice president infrastructure and security at Redington MEA. “The move would also help our development team be more innovative and productive, because they were being held back by an inflexible and complex infrastructure.”

Citrus Consulting used VMware Cloud on AWS, a managed service that combines compute, network, and storage capabilities in a fully supported, ready-to-run system. After some planning and preparation, Redington MEA migrated to the new system over a weekend, and users started work on Monday with zero disruption. “Our users didn’t even realize that the transformation had taken place because we were able to retain the infrastructure configurations,” says Ramling. “But the faster compute and reduced latency improved system performance between 150 and 200 percent.”

Redington Gulf’s developers are now able to instantly create development environments to test new product ideas or features, without up-front expenditure. In addition, they are no longer responsible for maintaining the infrastructure, so they have more time to work on projects, cutting previous development time by up to 75 percent. “Provisioning new environments used to take weeks—with infrastructure as code, it’s done in seconds,” says Ramling. “With more time on their hands, projects that used to take our developers several months can now be completed in weeks—it’s impressive.”

Ramling explains that being able to build test products and fail early has helped deliver more innovative products and driven the company forward. “The business can now innovate by creating small test projects and delivering them quickly without long-term, expensive commitments,” says Ramling.

When COVID-19 safety precautions required Redington's employees to work remotely, the company turned to Amazon WorkSpaces, which allows you to provision Windows or Linux desktops to users anytime, anywhere, and from any supported device. “We used Amazon WorkSpaces for secure and scalable remote connections during Covid, which ensured seamless business continuity,” says Ramling.

Citrus Consulting has now helped Redington MEA shut down the last of its on-premises infrastructure and migrate its remaining workloads to the cloud. In 2023, AWS opened its Middle East (UAE) Region, which provided Redington MEA with complete control over the location of its data, helping to comply with regulatory requirements. “Over the past few years, many countries that we operate in have introduced data residency policies,” says Ramling. “We now have a diverse range of compliant options to host our environments and store our data. It makes our life easy because we are familiar with these environments and it’s easy and safe to communicate between them.”

Ramling says that using AWS Regions has also improved the company’s backup and disaster recovery practices. “Using the AWS Middle East Region gives us a number of options to back up and recover our data,” says Ramling. “Previously, we have used other locations, but there were latency issues—now we can use our own region and enjoy the performance.”

The completion of this project marks the start of Redington MEA’s journey to becoming a fully cloud-native company. “We will keep modernizing and moving away from monolithic applications and toward microservices, artificial intelligence, and other cutting-edge technologies,” says Ramling. “This is a continuous journey, and we will keep transforming and upgrading, and eventually become a true cloud-native company.”