Long-Term Partnership Powers Competitive Edge in a Dynamic Market

At Acora, we have worked with one of our long-term Financial Services customers for many years. As a leading international investment company that backs businesses with capital, expertise and long-term strategic support, the organisation requires continued trust and a deeper understanding of their ongoing needs as time evolves.

With ambitious targets around investment decisions, portfolio management and retaining a competitive edge in a dynamic global market, they look to refresh their IT strategy every four to five years. With a continuous focus on system modernisation, performance improvement, and ensuring robust security measures are in place, this engagement marks the third collaboration with us.

As partners responsible for managing their Infrastructure, Service Desk, and providing a comprehensive Full-Stack IT Solution, we are proud to continue the long-standing relationship together, building on the upcoming growth opportunities from the organisation.

Workshops That Spark Enhancement Opportunities

As part of the ongoing partnership between the customer and Acora, we continually host stakeholder workshops that focus on identifying enhancement opportunities across Infrastructure, Security and Data.

Just like many Financial Service organisations that we work with, our customer needed to completely refresh their legacy hardware to maximise performance and ensure security was robust. This requirement meant deploying Windows 11 to upgrade to the latest Windows build; however, the opportunity posed significant logistical and technical challenges.

Our customer also needed to significantly improve their operational efficiency and data security by moving away from an ageing data centre environment, migrating their infrastructure to Azure and ultimately, adopting a cloud-first strategy. Additionally, a secure backup solution was needed, as standard Azure backups were deemed insufficient.

Another critical challenge posed for our customer was transitioning from their existing Citrix environment to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). This was necessary to meet the needs of their outsourced finance provider and VIP users, ensuring a seamless user experience comparable to the data center-hosted Citrix platform. The transformation also required a new WAN solution to support the migration to Azure, ensuring performant internet connectivity for accessing all cloud services.

Finally, the closure of legacy data centres was imperative to reduce costs and improve operational flexibility.

Leveraging Cloud Tooling to Provide a Unified Experience

Tackling these enhancement opportunities together, Acora led with coordinated solutions that would ignite their cloud-first transition.

Firstly, came the deployment of Windows 11, managed using AutoPilot with Direct Azure AD join build, ensuring seamless integration and compatibility testing of all Line of Business (LoB) applications. The AVD platform was designed to provide a unified experience across all devices, leveraging Windows 11 and Intune for improved management and flexibility. This ran in parallel with the infrastructure migration to Azure, which was implemented with a cloud-first approach, covering Azure Landing Zones, Cyber Backup, Infrastructure Rebuild at the London office, Virtual Machine Migrations, and File & Exchange Migration.

We then turned to addressing the need for a secure backup solution, integrating Rubrik with Azure for off-site backup, enhancing Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO). The WAN transformation project then came next, transitioning from VPLS to a resilient site-to-site VPN configuration, incorporating Zscaler for simplified and improved network control.

Then, finally, the decommissioning of legacy data centres was completed post-migration with no impact on operations, reducing costs and improving operational flexibility.

Bringing Operations Under One Roof

The transformation had a significant impact on the customer, delivered confidently and consistently by our expertise and qualified team at Acora.

The Windows 11 deployment was executed through AutoPilot, leveraging an AVD solution which improved management and flexibility, while the WAN transformation simplified and improved network control. Meanwhile, the infrastructure migration to Azure meant that the customer no longer had data centers to manage, with all operations centralised under Microsoft.

The customer experienced several measurable benefits from the transformation, including cost savings from a reduced data center footprint and operational costs, increased flexibility and real-time updates, improved security and performance, and operational improvements such as easier patching and a reduced server estate.

Next Up: Three-Year IT Strategy Roadmap

Trust and transparency are cornerstones of our relationship with the customer, allowing for comprehensive strategic planning and better decisions regarding the five-year total cost of ownership.

The next engagement on the list was working closely with our Chief Information Officer to develop a three-year strategy built on our full-stack approach. The vision: become fully cloud-native by breaking down a large-scale transformation into targeted initiatives across cloud, data & AI, support services, and cyber security.

The groundwork laid today supports future innovations, ensuring the customer remains at the forefront of technology.