How our fully managed overlay is cutting costs and improving data centre efficiencies for a global company with over 100,000 employees.
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.
At one of the largest accounting and professional services organisations in the world, they were struggling to process their ever-swelling stream of data when they reached out to us.
Running two data centres was proving to be expensive and time-consuming. As the consulting firm’s existing contract was coming to a close, they decided now was the right time to consolidate two into one. While bringing down costs, consolidating would also make their system easier to monitor and manage.
The company was looking to exit their existing facility within six months. And they wanted to move all of their critical apps over to a new system. A system that could reduce their footprint, whilst giving them greater capacity to handle future data growth easily.
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 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's 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 made sure network traffic stayed steady.
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.
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 their 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 power consumption down significantly to align with 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.