How Wildbreads Fresh Modernised Their Legacy Citrix Infrastructure with Microsoft Azure Cloud

In 2021, Wildbreads Fresh Pty Limited split from Wild Breads Pty Limited (now Nomad Breads Pty Limited) with a new focus on supplying fresh baked goods to cafes and small stores.

Following this reorganisation, Wildbreads Fresh—which currently boasts roughly 60 users across Queensland, Western Australia, and Manila—faced a new challenge. Despite the divestment of half the business, the new company were still paying the total cost of the ICT environment that had formerly been utilised by both business streams.

Refreshing their environment stood to reduce the company’s costs by right-sizing underutilised resources. At the same time, an updated infrastructure would meet their new business requirements while also delivering improved efficiencies and performance through the deployment of more modern technologies.

Moving Forward with Mangano IT

Wildbreads Fresh approached Mangano IT for support in making these changes. “We’d used Mangano as our IT provider for a number of years, so they had a good understanding of our business”, explains Kim Carrigan, Owner of the new Wildbreads Fresh organisation.

Despite this long-standing relationship, developing a solution that would meet these needs still required close collaboration between both teams, including multiple rounds of proposals to address questions and concerns raised by Carrigan. “Kim pushed us to refine our approach to proposals, resulting in much tighter specs and more specific costs than we initially put forward”, says Robert Mangano, Mangano IT’s Director.

Carrigan agrees, noting that, “Mangano IT have become much better and very tight on what they do. There have been some really positive steps, working with them today compared to [in the past]”.

Designing a Modern ICT Infrastructure

Following this initial alignment, our team mapped out a proposed infrastructure built around a brand-new Azure and Microsoft 365 tenancy. This environment would be built from the ground up and customised to accommodate the company’s existing core and line-of-business applications.

Wildbread’s new environment was planned with essential security baselines that included secure network access for workers at on-site and remote locations. Overhauls of the company’s on-premises networking and internet connectivity were required to ensure a robust, secure platform with cost-effective, business-grade internet service.

This planning process surfaced two primary challenges to address ahead of the migration. First, because Wildbreads runs a 24×7 operation, extensive collaboration would be required across internal and external stakeholders to minimise downtime throughout the transition.

Additionally, because Wildbreads utilises a number of specialised third-party software tools, the migration strategy needed to properly account for all relevant systems and data. The company’s legacy Citrix environment also posed challenges, as the existing infrastructure and new implementation could not be run concurrently. These challenges required careful and extended conversations with all respective parties to ensure the migration could be carried out successfully.

“We don’t have a massive infrastructure, but it has certain complexities that are abnormal”, says Carrigan. “And so there are a lot of things that are quite hard to get your head around how to implement those changes”.

Executing an On-Time, On-Spec Migration

This early-stage planning work paid off once the work of the migration commenced. According to Carrigan, “Once everyone was onboard with what was needed, it went very smoothly; it’s actually been run to spec perfectly”.

Kim Carrigan, Owner, Wildbreads Fresh

In particular, he emphasises the quality of the communications throughout the migration process. “Justin Graham, who ran it, was a very, very good communicator, analyst, and planner. He executed the migration tightly; we changed over within the hour he said we would. We had a couple of small glitches that hung over for a week or two, but they weren’t project-critical”.

One such glitch stemmed from the company’s decision to continue using its existing Wise terminals. “It probably would have been easier if we simply bought new devices”, Carrigan says. “But they did manage to make, I think, 99 per cent of them work, which has been good”.

Enjoying a Safer, More Cost-Effective ICT Environment

Despite initial challenges during the proposal stage, Carrigan is ultimately satisfied with his decision to move forward with Mangano IT. Speaking on his experience migrating to the new infrastructure, he says, “It was delivered very well. They’ve come through with shining colours at the end of that process”.

One tangible benefit the company has seen following the transition has been a reduction in the amount of disk space being used, with the newer, smaller server footprint resulting in a direct cost-benefit. “We were one of the first Citrix users in Australia, and our system hadn’t been updated in 10 years—maybe 15 years”, says Carrigan. “So to take our network, clean it up, and give it a new lease on life was pretty significant in itself”.

Carrigan also highlights the new system’s security and operational efficiency following the implementation of enhanced security protocols, including two-factor authentication.

“It’s efficient, it works well, it’s smooth, it has very, very few glitches, and it seems to be well managed”, he says. “The monitoring of the system is really good. If something goes down, we know immediately about a problem”.

Reflecting on the project’s success, Carrigan is pleased to recommend Mangano IT to other companies seeking similar Microsoft Azure migration services. “Make sure to scope well, and make sure you know what you’re getting and what your expectations are”, he notes.

“But I’m quite happy with the decision. It was very cost-effective, it was competently executed, and the outcome has been good. I’m happy that we achieved the plan as efficiently and as well as we did”.

Kim Carrigan, Owner, Wildbreads Fresh