Digital transformation for international expansion

Nigel Frank International part of the Tenth Revolution Group is an award-winning, multi-brand specialist global recruitment firm with over 1000 employees.

Business requirements

Nigel Frank International was experiencing rapid YoY growth on a global scale whilst still operating with an internal data centre, shared storage and an ageing on-premise infrastructure. As a result the company’s IT department was finding it increasingly difficult to scale.

Focusing on growing its business while enabling employees’ success and motivation through “exceptional office facilities, top-level training, fast-track career progression, and ongoing professional development” is a major strategy for Nigel Frank International.

Tenth Revolution Group COO Mark Hill knew that the organisation’s current systems and environment needed updating to improve agility and create a flexible working environment across all offices. Inevitably that meant aligning the business to a Digital First strategy moving away from on-premise technology and migrating to the cloud.

Why Microsoft Azure and Acora?

Having decided on Microsoft Azure as its cloud platform of choice, Nigel Frank International’s initial requirement was to find a suitable partner to support them with the migration. In Acora they found a partner who could not only design and build the technology solution and migrate them to Azure, but could provide ongoing support of their cloud environment, freeing up time for the internal IT team to focus on more strategic initiatives.

The IT team soon recognised that Acora had strong experience at moving legacy systems and workloads from a traditional platform in to Azure leveraging IaaS and PaaS and at the same time take into consideration compliance, governance and legal requirements for archiving and securing data.

Acora Approach

Acora set out with the main objective to transform the company’s datacentre environment

• Service Design
  The first step was to engage Acora’s cloud architects to define a global service design for the new Azure platform. The service design engagement output was a comprehensive design document, developed from information collated during service design workshops and knowledge gathering meetings. Acora worked with Nigel Frank International’s internal stakeholders to finalise the Azure design and migration approach ready to execute the transition project.

• Migration
  Following the sign-off of the target Azure architecture, Acora’s Project Management team started planning and initiating the Azure Migration project involving NFI’s offices across Europe, US and Australia. The project took 6 months to complete and was delivered within the time and budget parameters set by Frank Recruitment.

• Management
  Acora now provide ongoing 24/7 management and support of NFI’s Azure environment. A dedicated support team looks after Nigel Frank International’s systems, services and applications, making sure they are constantly monitored and protected and are available to support the growing needs of the organisation.

Business benefits of the new Azure environment

• Flexible working
  Nigel Frank International’s global workforce are able to work anywhere and on any device and with increased collaboration.
• Cost saving
  Moving the on-premise infrastucture over to Azure has meant retiring some traditional on premises infrastructure and software tools which is removing significant cost from the organisation annually.
• High availability and global scalability
  moving to the cloud has enabled Nigel Frank International’s IT department to scale much more easily across their global footprint.
• Improved security & compliance
  Microsoft Azure is a leader in IaaS security and Nigel Frank International’s environment is safeguarded with tools and technologies that protect the platform and the end user.
• Global data centres
  Because Azure is backed up by Microsoft’s growing number of global managed data centres, user experience is greatly improved by having a local data centre.