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
As Liaison Group outgrew their office space, they turned to cloud migration to support their growing needs. Rather than investing in new hardware and expanding office premises, the company opted for remote work and moved their IT infrastructure to the cloud. The urgency of this shift was amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic, making remote work essential.
The main goals of this project were:
- Ability to work remotely whilst continuing to operate as normal and providing all staff with a standardised homogenous experience.
- Removal of on-premises hardware and scalability of IT systems to scale up (or down) on demand.
- Ensure that IT security is never compromised.
Having worked with Liaison Group for over five years, Impact IT was tasked with leading the cloud migration to provide a flexible, secure, and reliable IT solution. As Microsoft Gold Partners, we utilised Microsoft Azure, Teams, SharePoint, and Office 365 to meet these needs.
As Microsoft Gold Partners, we delivered the needs of our client utilising Microsoft Azure, Teams, SharePoint and Office 365.
Summary
- 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.
- Access to clinical NHS systems via their newly commissioned Azure Express Route into the HSCN (Health and Social care network – formerly the N3).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
