The Dawood Hercules Group is the largest Pakistani conglomerate and a pioneer in moving its IT systems to the Cloud to improve resilience and cut operating costs. Dawood Hercules needed to upgrade its communications and collaboration platform. After evaluating available offerings, it chose Microsoft Office 365 in the public cloud and migrated more than 500 users—with the potential to scale up to 2,000 users in associated companies. Describing the Group’s transition to the Cloud, Shahid H. Pracha, CEO Dawood Hercules, said, “Business continuity is a key factor in our business and moving to the cloud doesn’t require Dawood Hercules to change the way it works, because the service is based on familiar productivity tools which our people know and trust. This transition will also help us to improve shareholder value�?. Amir Rao, Country Manager, Microsoft, while talking about the system, said, “Office 365 has the best-in-class cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools which has enabled our customers to spend fewer resources and time on IT and focus on their core business. Regardless of the business size, any organization can now get enterprise-caliber software and services for the first time with reduced cost and can stay updated more easily using the product�?. The Dawood Hercules Group has one subsidiary and seven affiliated companies, all of which share centralized IT services. The move to the Cloud was led by Dawood Hercules Corporation, the flagship investment holding company of the Group. This strategy has helped to avoid capital expenditure on a new communications and collaboration infrastructure. Office 365 is fully compatible with existing desktop formats, email, and data. And, because it’s in the cloud, operating costs are significantly reduced. The Group’s transition to the Cloud has been documented via a case study which may be seen at microsoft.com/casestudies