About the Business
Our client is a commercial real estate firm based in north London with multiple offices spread in and around the city. The firm has over 25 years' industry experience and their client portfolio is mostly concentrated inthe commercial real estate market.
Industry: Commercial Real Estate
Organisation Size: Less than 50 employees
Service Areas: Microsoft Azure Hosted Desktops and Servers, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams Telephony
Challenge
The business was operating from four offices located across multiple physical locations in London. As the business had grown each site was operating independent databases for customers, services, sales invoices and other types of data.
Communication and collaboration of data between sites was facilitated through email attachments and legacy BT ISDN lines with no central management.
This in reality and over the years had proven to reduce the agility of the business and the productivity of the employees across the business.
Over a few brainstorming sessions between the business management team and our infrastructure team it was made clear that running multiple databases across the business is proving cumbersome, can potentially introduce security risks, reporting is triplicated and communication across the business is non-existent.
Furthermore, each site is reliant on the physical infrastructure which is hosted at the branch and no particular disaster recovery or business continuity solution was in place. During previous instances where the database server had failed the business had no option other than to endure the delay in sourcing replacement hardware for the backups to be restored on to.
The workstations weren’t centrally managed and therefore any cost of infrastructure management and monitoring historically had not been economical and resulted into increased costs over time. The regular upgrades of the server infrastructure at each site had also proven to become quite costly over the years.
Solution
+ Deployed a central Microsoft Azure Server solution and consolidated all databases into one.
+ Subsequently introduced a central file server with branch specific permissions and access.
+ Introduced a Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop Services Server (RDS) to enable end user computing and access to data and databases.
+ Introduced Azure GRS Backups (Geo-redundant storage) and ZRS Backups that replicates data in availability zones, guaranteeing data residency and resiliency in the same region.
+ Introduced Microsoft Teams Telephony across all branches and decommissioned the ISDN lines.
+ Upgraded all laptops to Windows 11 and deployed a mobile device management solution offered by Azure to centrally managed these devices.
Outcome
It was clear that the business was in need of a digital transformation. The newly appointed operations manager identified the deficits in the business and following a recommendation through our client network was recommended to us.
The business now operates a central repository of data with access, permissions, security and backup all centrally managed in the cloud.
During 2019 when a new site was opened the business did not need to invest in new server infrastructure and seamlessly only increased their Azure user count relevant to the number of employees which were due to start at the new site.
Collaboration and communication across the business over the years increased significantly and ultimately the business saw a seamless increase of 30% in sales year on year and a cost saving of 60% on the IT front.
The cost of poor technology and infrastructure is always hidden and not tangible. The only way to identify these pitfalls is to partner with a business which is familiar with the challenges of the sector and the solutions that can be introduced to mitigate against these issues.
At Lyon Manged Services we have many years of experience dealing with businesses in the creative sector ranging from real estate, property development, architecture, structural engineer, marketing, architecture visualisation, post production and can help identify these issues and offer solutions matching your needs.
Services Taken: Managed Services (Azure Virtual Servers), Microsoft 365, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Teams Telephony.
