A large industrial complex for the production of sugar found itself in a war zone. Not only the entire production, but also the company’s IT equipment came under fire from the Russians. But cloud technologies have helped restore its business processes.

Ukrainian Sugar Company is a subsidiary of ED&F Man, one of the world's largest suppliers of food, sugar, spices, coffee, pet food, biofuels, etc. The USC company specialises in the production of beet and cane sugar. To do this, it grows beets on its own or rented fields in the South of Ukraine and imports raw cane sugar. The company adheres to international food safety standards, including ISO 22000.

Industrial complex of the Ukrainian Sugar Company for sugar production

Task

Ukrainian Sugar Company operates on the basis of Zasilskyi Sugar Refinery in Pervomaiske, Mykolaiv region. Fields, workshops, warehouses and an office with server equipment are also located there.

Special software is used for the efficient operation of such a large industrial complex, and it covers the main tasks of management and accounting. It allows the company to automate the following most important areas of business: accounting, trade, warehouse, payroll, personnel accounting, etc. The software was hosted on its own server in the office, because it was convenient and usual. The company planned to transfer part of its resources to the cloud to build a safer IT infrastructure. But they didn't have time.

Electricity and the Internet have disappeared within Mykolaiv Region due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. "Ukrainian Sugar Company" came under fire from the invaders and stopped working. Only a month later, specialists managed to take the server to a safer place and make a copy of the virtual machine at the cost of great efforts. After that, the company started preparing for cloud migration.

Russian troops shelled the enterprise and damaged the production premises

Solution

For USC specialists the main criterion for choosing a cloud operator was the possibility of placement outside of Ukraine. GigaCloud offered a public cloud infrastructure based on the VMware platform which is located at a site in the EU.

GigaCloud hosts its equipment in the Atman data centre in Warsaw, which corresponds to the Tier III level. USC moved there its software complex to manage all business processes.

Since USC employees left for safer regions of Ukraine and abroad, GigaCloud specialists helped with the migration of the program to the cloud – it was possible to configure the cloud infrastructure, launch the program, and restore the company's business processes in the format of tickets and by phone.

The migration lasted a week. Since then, the company has been working stably in the cloud.

The ED&F Man company invested more than 142 million dollars in Ukrainian agribusiness during the period of its work in Ukraine

Result

In addition to the opportunity to restore business processes, Ukrainian Sugar Company specialists received a number of the following opportunities after moving to the cloud:

• Organization of remote work of the team from any place and from any device (phone, laptop, computer).
• Flexible management of the amount of computing resources.
• Fault tolerance.
• 24/7 technical support from GigaCloud.

"This is not how we imagined the transformation of our IT infrastructure, but life has shown that sometimes little depends on us," says Serhiy Pronin, computer systems engineer of Ukrainian Sugar Company. “I am glad that even under such difficult conditions we felt the benefits of working with cloud technologies, and we are grateful to GigaCloud specialists who helped us in this. We enjoy working in the cloud and plan to expand in the future.”