BUSINESS MODERNISATION CASE STUDY: REPLACING LEGACY SYSTEMS WITH BRISTOL RECRUITMENT COMPANY
Optimising IT was brought in as award-winning IT leaders and experts in new technologies to address the changing business needs of Bristol Recruitment Company. What started as a cyber security initiative to manage security risk and upgrade IT resources for digital data turned into a full-scale legacy system modernisation project. Read our legacy modernisation case study to find out how we transformed this business’s existing systems.
THE BUSINESS: BRISTOL RECRUITMENT COMPANY
The Bristol Recruitment Company is a well-known and highly-reputable technical recruiter with over 20 years of industry experience. When they came to Optimising IT, their legacy systems and legacy applications included:
- Old-fashioned onsite servers with high maintenance costs
- Legacy applications hosted on-premise, including finance and file sharing legacy software
- Physical phone handsets
- Legacy Anti Virus solutions with outdated security updates and protocols
- An onsite recruitment database with no cloud-based alternative.
Bristol Recruitment Company had started some light forms of digital transformation and were replacing some legacy applications. They had:
- Office 365 for email and Office applications
- Dropbox, which was used for remote file-sharing alongside their existing system
- A cloud-based phone system (Although this was still linked to their legacy system).
THE CHALLENGE FACED BY BRISTOL RECRUITMENT COMPANY AND THEIR EXISTING SYSTEMS
While they’d started working towards digital transformation and replacing legacy applications, Bristol Recruitment Company was unaware of just how badly they needed a full-scale legacy system modernisation project.
The Bristol Recruitment Company originally came to us looking for Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus certification services. This was outside of any desire to replace legacy systems and entirely related to changing data security demands and customer data protection.
The business goals at this point were to align digital practice with changing data security demands. Other aspects of IT development were not considered new, and significant challenges evolving within the data security space had captured Bristol Recruitment Company’s attention.
The first national UK lockdown in 2020 brought the true needs of Bristol Recruitment Company into focus with the realisation that long-term, flexible work was going to be essential for growth and development.
As a result of the pandemic, this Bristol-based business’ requirements expanded to include Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus Certification and information technology that helped them be fully remote and offer flexible working conditions. The full requirements became:
- Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus Certification
- IT systems that allowed for seamless, flexible and secure work from any location
- Removal of the reliance on End of Life on-premise legacy systems
- Retention of access to legacy on-premise applications to allow for smooth legacy system migration
- Removal of the need for remote client VPN and adoption of secure cloud infrastructure.
THE RESULTS: WHAT DID WE DO?
Optimising IT proposed a complete Modern Desktop legacy system migration, alongside our fully remote Cyber Essentials Plus Certification. The combination of both factors would meet and exceed the productivity and security requirements of Bristol Recruitment Company.
The solution implemented consisted of the following elements:
- Managed and optimised Microsoft 365 Licenses
- Microsoft Modern Workplace integration
- Microsoft Azure Hybrid joined with traditional Active Directory for legacy software support
- Microsoft Azure for legacy application server and smooth legacy system migration
- Intune for Device Management
- Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
- Azure web gateway and Virtual Desktop for legacy application access, maintaining legacy systems as needed until they could upgrade them without disruption
- Voice in Teams for all telephony requirements
- Our full suite of Optimising IT cyber security services which includes vulnerability scanning, Cyber Essentials, Cyber Essentials Plus Certification and more.
- Ongoing managed IT services and cyber security consultancy.
In our post-project survey, Bristol Recruitment Company gave our team a 10/10 for execution and delivery.
OUR APPROACH TO THEIR LEGACY SYSTEM: HOW DID WE DO IT?
We worked with Bristol Recruitment Company to provide a seamless transition that supported both user experience and business process using our dedicated and highly skilled project delivery team. We mitigated risks to disruption and ensured their staff could continue to work with high productivity levels, even while migrating legacy systems.
While every project is different, on this occasion, we used our standard approach to Modern Workplace transitions as we believed it would be (and was) the most effective way of handling our modernisation efforts:
- Conduct a detailed discovery plan to identify problems
- Migrate file sharing to One Drive and SharePoint
- Implement Azure AD Hybrid and setup Intune
- Migrate user devices to Azure AD
- Migrate legacy application server to Azure hosting
- Implement Azure web gateway and Windows virtual desktop for legacy application access
- Decommission legacy on-premise servers
- Implement Cyber Essentials platform, agents and deliver Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus compliance and certification.
Through this strategy, we were able to optimise business processes and progress with vital efforts of legacy system modernisation.
HIGHLIGHTS AND BENEFITS FOR BRISTOL RECRUITMENT COMPANY
This project provided immense business value to Bristol Recruitment Company and one of the most ambitious yet successful legacy modernisation projects we’ve ever delivered. From replacing old systems to introducing new strategies and new technologies to support changing business needs, are some of the highlights of the project deployed by the IT leaders here at Optimising IT:
- Our legacy modernisation approach means that all staff can now access every business system used by Bristol Recruitment Company seamlessly and remotely from anywhere that has an internet connection through new technology, including cloud-based services.
- Increased cyber security and lower risk from cyber attacks
- Commercial differentiation from the competition with Cyber Essentials Plus in place and the ability to bid on additional contracts through tender prequalification as a result
- Operational access to best-in-class collaboration tools (Microsoft Teams) and business-grade telephony from desktop and mobile devices
- Access to award-winning and ongoing IT support and consultancy, ensuring that all staff can maximise the benefits and capabilities of the new platform.
