Case Study: Bidvest Panalpina Logistics achieves agile cloud transformation and R35M savings with Microsoft Azure

South African logistics experts transform operations with an agile move to cloud

Bidvest Panalpina Logistics (BPL), a leading South African supply‑chain and logistics provider with more than 1,400 employees across 20 locations, needed to modernize its aging data center to handle peak periods, resolve performance and disaster‑recovery failures, and reduce dependence on unreliable local power and bandwidth. On‑premises replication was cumbersome (DR dry runs could take up to seven days), so BPL chose to pursue a full migration to the cloud to boost agility and reliability.

Partnering with BUI, BPL moved production workloads, backup, DR and offsite replication to Microsoft Azure using Azure Site Recovery, Azure Backup, StorSimple, Operations Management Suite and Office 365 in a lift‑and‑shift approach. The migration—managed by one IT lead—streamlined the five‑person IT team, eliminated delays, improved backend performance and collaboration, sparked a cloud‑first culture, and is projected to save about 35 million rand (≈US$2.7M) over five years while enabling further cloud adoption.

Bidvest Panalpina Logistics

Morne Visser

IT Operations and Infrastructure Manager