The Client
Liaison Group is a technology-driven organisation with a strong focus on using technology to innovate and with 340 staff covering several areas of the financial management industry. Liaison Group predominantly provide services for the NHS, such as VAT advisement, consultancy and staff & shift booking systems to enable hospitals to share staff rather than go via an agency.Project Overview
In order to provide their services, the client operated a split, with most of their staff working from their offices. The rest were stationed at their respective hospital trusts. However, they were outgrowing their office space, so rather than upscale their premises and buy in more hardware, they decided that they would like to look at working from home and shift their IT to the cloud. Coupled with Covid the need to work remotely was paramount.The main goals of this project were:
- 1. Ability to work remotely whilst continuing to operate as normal and providing all staff with a standardised homogenous experience.
- 2. Removal of on-premises hardware and scalability of IT systems to scale up (or down) on demand.
- 3. Ensure that IT security is never compromised.
Summary
- 1. All staff able to work remotely, with secure P2S (point to site) VPN to their private cloud, complemented with hosted email, corporate drives, telephony and video collaboration using Microsoft Teams.
- 2. Access to clinical NHS systems via their newly commissioned Azure Express Route into the HSCN (Health and Social care network – formerly the N3).
- 3. Scalability of their IT systems, providing the ability to add or remove resources to their environment on demand via the support desk with an efficient agile change control process.
- 4. Increased security of their endpoints by implementing Windows Hello multi factor authentication across the board, teamed with existing Microsoft BitLocker protection for drive encryption. We added our support and monitoring agent to provide real-time access, support and device management.
- 5. 100% reduction in their staff working from the office, no need to rent large premises for over 150 staff resulting in significant cost savings and solving the issue of expansion.
- 6. Ongoing improvements in their Office 365 and Microsoft Azure cloud, following Microsoft best practice advice and security hardening in line with the ever-changing landscape of IT security.
