LIMA Cloud – the perfect solution for Miller’s Vanguard
Company background
Miller’s Vanguard is a service provider to the bakery and catering industry, delivering reactive maintenance, planned preventative maintenance and installation work across the UK.
The business serves blue-chip clients across the supermarket and coffee house sectors and has built its reputation over 30 years with a focus on delivering a first-time fix for customers. Miller’s Vanguard is part of ALI Group SRL, an international group of food services businesses.
Information Systems Manager Dean Rooney manages the IT team, supporting over 400 employees. LIMA has been the trusted MSP for the business for over ten years, providing third-line infrastructure support while the in-house team handles day-to-day issues. Earlier this year, the relationship entered a new phase, with Miller’s Vanguard making the decision to move its virtual server estate from on-premise infrastructure to LIMA’s private cloud service, LIMA Cloud.
“LIMA Cloud is the perfect solution.”
Dean Rooney | Information Systems Manager | Miller’s Vanguard
The challenge
With on-premise hardware approaching end of useful life, Miller’s Vanguard faced a choice: invest in a full infrastructure refresh or make the move to cloud.
For Dean, the financial and operational case for cloud had shifted.
“The gap has closed two ways,” he explains. “Cloud services have got cheaper, and on-premise hardware has got more expensive. The time was right to make the leap.”
On top of the cost equation, the business was running up against capacity limits. Storage in particular had become a constant juggling act, squeezing resources to free up space that could be reused. And with Miller’s Vanguard operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, power resilience at their site was a concern.
“On-premise hardware has a finite capacity from the day it’s built,” says Dean. “By year five of the existing kit in a growing business, we were having to be creative to juggle resources. We were also losing power to the site more often than we’d have liked, and needed to take that risk away from the business.”
The solution
LIMA Cloud
Miller’s Vanguard evaluated both public and private cloud before settling on LIMA Cloud. While Azure was considered, the business valued the fixed-term pricing, the trust built over a decade of partnership and the simplicity of migrating existing VMware stacks directly into LIMA’s private cloud environment.
“LIMA Cloud is the perfect solution. All the functionality we need is there, and we were able to build the link between on-prem and LIMA Cloud very quickly, and migrate existing VMware stacks with very little downtime,” Dean explains.
“We didn’t have to build lots of new services from scratch and transition data and applications across. That would have been far more time-consuming and carried much more risk.”
Working closely with the LIMA team, Dean sized the initial capacity requirements, agreed a phased migration plan and moved the first half of the estate to LIMA Cloud earlier this year. The second phase is currently underway, with the full virtual estate expected to be on LIMA Cloud by the end of 2026. The existing on-premise hardware will be repurposed as a low-risk dev environment, rather than retired outright.
A migration done right
For a business running round-the-clock operations, a migration that causes downtime simply isn’t an option. If engineers in the field can’t receive jobs, complete work orders or log information, Miller’s Vanguard’s customers lose revenue.
Dean is glowing about how the first phase was delivered by LIMA: “The transition was seamless. Our business didn’t suffer any downtime whatsoever. It was a really competent, well-planned and well-executed piece of work. All the time markers were hit. There was no need to roll anything back.”
“I’ve worked with lots of MSPs over the years and I’ve found LIMA to be the best one.”
Dean Rooney | Information Systems Manager | Miller’s Vanguard
The outcomes
Moving to LIMA Cloud has resolved capacity constraints which create ongoing operational friction. Storage that previously required constant management is now provisioned on demand through LIMA’s wider infrastructure.
“If I suddenly need another five terabytes for a project, that’s available almost immediately,” says Dean. “Those storage issues are now LIMA’s problem, not ours. That’s a significant shift.”
The commercial model has also brought greater financial clarity. Rather than buying excess capacity on day one and growing into it over years, Miller’s Vanguard now scales its infrastructure as the business requires, with a fixed three-year term providing the cost predictability the finance team needs.
Backup as a Service and Disaster Recovery as a Service sit on top of the cloud infrastructure, providing tiered backup schedules and an independently hosted DR environment. Given that Miller’s Vanguard is frequently asked to evidence its DR strategy as part of client tender processes, having a clearly defined and tested approach has become a genuine commercial asset.
“If we can’t send jobs to engineers, it’s our customers who are suffering most,” Dean explains. “To win business we have to be able to evidence that we can get our systems back up and running quickly. LIMA gives us that confidence.”
A partnership built on trust
The cloud migration is the latest chapter in a relationship that stretches back over a decade. Miller’s Vanguard is confident in the service delivered by LIMA.
The 24/7 cover provided through LIMA’s ProActive Managed Service is central to that confidence. As a round-the-clock operation, Miller’s Vanguard cannot afford to wait until morning to discover an overnight failure.
“I’ve come in to find emails saying something went off during the night, they could see why it happened, they put a remediation in and had it back up within 20 minutes,” says Dean. “That’s great. It means we’re not walking into a difficult situation in the office in the morning!”
“What LIMA offers is a really approachable MSP experience where you feel valued as a partner rather than just a customer. That’s important, and they work hard at it and drive it really well.”
“I’ve worked with lots of MSPs over the years and I’ve found LIMA to be the best one. The account management and engineering teams are really strong, and they have a real drive to work with us to develop strategy and help us adopt new technologies.” – Dean Rooney, Information Systems Manager, Miller’s Vanguard