About the Business
Our client is an investment management company based in London and the Cayman Islands. The business offers discretionary and advisory investment management services to high net-worth individuals.
Industry: Investment Management
Organisation Size: Less than 50 employees
Service Areas: Managed Services (Azure), Professional Services, Cloud Migration, Licensing
Challenge
Relying on a mixture of on-premises data storage solutions ranging from servers, network storage devices and the inevitable presence of company data on end user devices such as laptops and workstations had resulted into the business facing multiple challenges in collaborating effectively across offices.
Access to a speedy internet connection was also one of the minimum requirements of the business. Various financial platforms which were used across multiple teams meant that instant access and response times from these platforms were vital to the business operating successfully. Due to the nature of the work, the employees were required to travel to multiple international countries through the year. Naturally their connection experience to the infrastructure varied and therefore this critically affected how effectively they are able to carry out their work.
Furthermore, with the ever-increasing cyber-attacks, security requirements imposed by the regulators and the ever-evolving tactics of cyber criminals it was clear that the business will need to transform its technology landscape to better suit its needs allowing a secure and scalable technology infrastructure.
Solution
+ Microsoft 365 strategy, roadmap, and envisioning session with the infrastructure team
+ Consolidation and segregation of multiple data points into Microsoft SharePoint
+ Desktop migrations to Azure Virtual Desktop limiting the need for high-speed internet access.
+ Windows 7 Home to Windows 10 Professional device upgrades.
+ Implementing best security practices for Azure and Microsoft 365.
+ Microsoft 365 deployment, upgrading from Office 2013 to Office 2019.
+ Microsoft Teams implementation for simple communication and collaboration.
+ Communications and in-house training by our team of engineers.
Outcome
To accomplish the above steps it was apparent that we had to centralise the data ideally with Microsoft SharePoint and then to subsequently migrate the end user compute over to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD).
We initially started with a few brainstorming sessions between our cloud migration team and various departments of the business identifying the location of the data, the structure they would envisage once migrated to Microsoft SharePoint and furthermore the access and security levels both internally and where required externally.
We then turned our attention to the software and applications which were installed across various laptops and workstations. Followed by a few meetings we established a standard structure of applications which are used across various departments and designed the necessary virtual machines with the associated applications. As part of this process the virtual machines were deployed with Windows 10, the latest Microsoft Office applications offered by Microsoft 365 and the Microsoft 365 Business Premium licensing.
This allowed the business to simply scale up and down the virtual machines depending on the number of employees it was hiring at any one time. Furthermore, any updates and changes across the machines whether they were in London or abroad was no longer an issue. Previously slow internet speeds and access times would have meant that updating the end user devices remotely may have taken weeks depending on their location around the world.
The current end user compute devices such as laptops and workstations were fully re-purposed and re-deployed with Microsoft Windows 10 operating systems and only served as a intermediary device to connect to the high performing Azure infrastructure.
The business was now fully operating in the cloud, had increased its agility and effectiveness, had further enabled and empowered it’s employees.
Services Taken: Managed Services (Azure Virtual Desktop), Managed Services (Azure Virtual Servers), Microsoft 365, Microsoft SharePoint
