Ukrainian Football Club Shakhtar is protecting its IT infrastructure with cloud
Just as a football team masterfully uses new tactics to outplay opponents and succeed, the IT Department of Ukrainian Football Club Shakhtar uses innovative technology to overcome threats and achieve its goals. Shakhtar and Microsoft Ukraine have had a long and successful history of joint projects aimed at increasing productivity. They’re now working together amidst uncertain circumstances in Eastern Ukraine.
The critical situation in Eastern Ukraine forced the Club to leave their base city, Donetsk, and relocate to three other cities. They’ve decided to transfer the team to Kyiv and the Children’s Academy to Poltava while hosting their games in Lviv. Therefore, setting up remote operations was a crucial task. Dmytro Teplyakov, CIO of Donbass Arena – Shakhtar’s main stadium and manager of back office operations – explains: “Besides the team, there is a staff of 30 people in Lviv and employees in other cities. Consequently, we were challenged to set up remote work for employees”.
Last year, Donbass Arena began to explore using Office 365 and Microsoft Azure, both of which proved to be reliable. Dmytro explains:
![13[1]](https://news.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads//2015/03/131.jpg)
To ensure that all business processes were up and running, even during cases of lost connection to the main data centre back in Donetsk, Donbass Arena opted for a hybrid infrastructure. Dmytro explains: “Firstly, we have employees, such as the administrator of the stadium reception office, who have a fixed work place and don’t have an urgent need to work in the cloud. Secondly, we transferred gradually to avoid a failure of the email service.”
Besides that, Donbass Arena needed to keep key business systems safe, such as for those of their accounting and finances, as well as their overall e-document system. To that end, Microsoft consultants deployed infrastructure based on Microsoft Azure. Dmytro explains:
![23[1]](https://news.microsoft.com/wp-content/uploads//2015/03/231.jpg)
The flexibility of the cloud platform allowed for the transfer of Donbass Arena’s separate systems to occur in just a week. But this is only the beginning. Dmytro concludes: “Shortly, we plan to transfer all our services to the cloud”.
