Reaching new heights with smarter cloud infrastructure

Overview

Every business is experiencing an explosion in data. But for global firms, this is magnified by the sheer scale of their clients, offices and employees.

One of the largest accounting and professional services organisations in the world was struggling to process its ever-swelling stream of data when they reached out to us.

The challenge

Two into one

Running two data centres was proving to be expensive and time-consuming. As the consulting firm’s existing contract was coming to a close, it decided now was the right time to consolidate two into one. While bringing down costs, it would also make their system easier to monitor and manage. The company was looking to exit its existing facility within six months. And it wanted to move all of its critical apps over to a new system. One that could reduce its footprint, whilst giving it greater capacity that would handle future data growth easily.

The solution

Fully-managed migration

To meet the company’s needs, we recommended SD Fabric. It’s a clever way to combine private data centres with the public cloud, giving businesses the best of both worlds. For those in the financial sector, this means continued access to those applications that only work in a private data centre, alongside the capability to use more cloud applications.

With SD Fabric, you can do a lot more with a lot less. Having 40 cabinets on this solution is the equivalent to 120 cabinets on an older legacy estate.  So it was perfect for consolidating two large data centres into one smaller facility.

It’s built on Cisco’s innovative ACI (Application-Centric Infrastructure) solution. It provides a managed data centre environment with software-defined features – such as increased automation, visibility, analytics and control. It makes networks fast and scalable, whilst reducing networking costs. And it’s designed to migrate applications securely, without the need to reconfigure them.

As a fully-managed service, we designed and delivered it all, handling the entire migration. We also set up managed firewalls, with our team of security experts continuously protecting the network. Load balancers to make sure network traffic stayed steady.

The result 

In just six months, we built the company a modern network infrastructure that could keep up with the data-driven future.  This involved moving two data centres into one, swiftly and securely. Now, the company has greater visibility and control, as well as a greater return on investment and lower running costs.

A global business that treads lightly

With our team of experts, we were able to move all applications and data from the existing facility on time. The migration involved no outage for the company, which meant there was no impact on its day-to-day business and applications.

The company now has more flexibility and greater capacity, which means they’re ready for any future increase in data. The new data centre has also reduced the company’s carbon footprint, bringing its power consumption down significantly to align with its sustainability goals. Working more efficiently has helped them cut their costs too.

Our managed service is now fully up and running. We continue to work with the customer to optimise their new network, innovate new solutions and make sure they’re ready for whatever the future holds.