Case study: Pollen Street Capital
Full Cloud migration to Azure, Office 365, EMS & Windows 10
“We are delighted with the Microsoft online solutions, the price is right and we get excellent helpdesk support from TechQuarters.”
Ian Gascoigne – Director, Pollen Street Capital
Company: Pollen Street Capital
Sector: Financial Services
The Scenario
Pollen Street Capital were part of RBS and needed to move off the existing infrastructure to a new premises. They didn’t want to invest in completely new infrastructure, but wanted a highly resilient and FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) compliant solution that could handle rapid internal expansion.
How TechQuarters helped
TechQuarters moved Pollen Street email to the Office 365 E3 plan as this covers the FCA regulatory legislation regarding email. We moved the domain controller and file server to Microsoft Azure because it is extremely resilient and guarantees 99.999% uptime, equating to less that 5 hours downtime a year, which was essential for Financial services sector.
The project took place prior to an office move at a time chosen to avoid downtime and ensure business continuity, with the entire infrastructure migrated seamlessly to the Microsoft Cloud. We fully migrated them from an ‘on-premise’ (the industry terms for a server on an organisations own premises) server stack to a Hosted Azure and Office 365 E3 Solution.
Pollen Street Capital now have remote desktop servers, SQL servers, their in-house developers use Visual Studio in Azure, a File Server, Domain Controller, Office 365 E3, Active Directory sync and Windows 10 desktops, using Bitlocker to secure the desktops and Azure blob storage for database development files. We also implemented Power BI to report on querying the data out of their SQL systems.
For security, TechQuarters implemented EMS with Advanced Threat protection and Multi-Factor Authentication. We now provide a fully Managed IT Service and ongoing support for Pollen Street Capital.
The Results
The move saved the business up to 30% in Capex spending and 40% in migration fees due to the speed of migration to Azure and Office 365, as opposed to building and shipping new on premise servers. Their monthly bill is now on a fixed Opex maintainable costs mechanism.
What Pollen Street Capital said
“We needed to move to our new offices and separate our IT from the RBS network. This gave us a great opportunity to look at new technology for storing data, having smarter communications and flexible working.
TechQuarters seamlessly helped us plan the move and migrate to the Microsoft cloud. Their consultant was efficient, helpful and delivered exactly what they said they would do, without any hassles. We are delighted with the Microsoft online solutions, the price is right and we get excellent helpdesk support from TechQuarters.”
Ian Gascoigne – Director, Pollen Street Capital