Connectivity About the client
Moray Group is a new professional services group for Scotland, an innovative umbrella brand. Bringing together industry experts across property, legal and financial to provide a diverse range of services to individuals, family businesses, SMEs and larger corporates.
With their passion for outstanding customer service,they are reinventing the professional services model and revolutionising the industry for the better by enhancing customer experience with innovative and leading-edge technologies.
The first two companies brought into the group were Alston Law, a firm specialising in conveyancing and debt recovery services to property and financial services clients and Simpson & Marwick one of Scotland’s oldest and most prestigious legal names.
The Challenge
As a brand committed to exceptional client service driven by technology, Moray knew they would have to revolutionise the underlying IT infrastructure of the companies brought under their umbrella in order to take advantage of the innovative leading edge technologies Moray are developing and championing. Having multiple distributed IT infrastructures would make the overall management tedious, time consuming and prone to security issues, and in the new world of remote working, phishing, BEC and ransomware attacks any solution would have to be secure first.
The overall solution had to meet strict requirements of:
- Security
- Flexibility
- Scalability
- Up time
- Ease of use
Due to legalities around the acquisitions the solution had to be delivered from a standing start in under 4 weeks bringing immense time pressures to move close to 100 staff from two separate companies, Alston Law and Simpson Marwick the first two acquisitions for the Moray Group, into a single platform.
The Solution
Both Alston Law and Simpson Marwick were already heavily invested in Microsoft and licensed for 365, although not making full use of it, so it made sense that we bring them into a singular cloud-based virtual desktop environment. Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) hosted in the Azure cloud was the logical choice and the best-suited cloud infrastructure for this transformation.
Due to the time constraints, a quick solution turnaround and fast company wide onboarding were essential. Certum was able to launch a WVD solution within a week of sign off as a POC. A cost-benefit assessment was performed, highlighting cost reduction benefits by utilising reserved instances rather than consumption based pay as you go.
Once confirmed the solution would meet all the project requirements Certum implemented a secure end to end managed solution on Azure Cloud that included Windows Virtual Desktop and Firewall implementation, data and Office 365 migration, line of business migration and integration, monitoring and management of the complete Azure environment.
All applications were centrally hosted and published across both companies. All workloads were standardised and delivered as a fully managed desktop or published application depending on user function.
Most importantly, Certum has employed best practice security. Locking down access to WVD via conditional access policies such as enforced Multi Factor Authentication has ensured that connections only come from trusted locations and devices.
Benefits
Management: Centralised desktop and application management ensures seamless integration of applications and peripheral devices, patch updates, application rollouts/rollbacks and conformity with security systems and practices.
Security: The use of best practice cloud security policies helps to secure the environment preventing data leak and misuse and protection from malicious attacks.
High Availability: The high availability architecture in Azure guarantees a minimum uptime of 99.9% so Moray no longer need to worry about maintenance operations and outages.
Scalability: A great feature of WVD on Azure is the ability to scale on demand to make sure Moray are always able to meet their requirements and growth without capex spend.
Flexibility: By hosting all desktops and applications in Azures cloud, access to data and applications across companies is seamless thereby improving user experience and productivity.
“A founding and guiding principle of Moray Group is that we will use technology in every way we can to improve and enhance the experience of our clients, whether they are individuals, families or businesses.
So, it was essential that our own launch was underpinned by the best possible technology, to be seamlessly rolled out despite the multiple challenges of the pandemic and of our need to bring together very different businesses quickly and effectively.
It was every bit the tall order it sounds. Not only did Certum deliver on all of this, they also achieved it while maintaining best in class digital security. Given our intention to grow rapidly through acquisition, we are now confident that the system delivered by Certum will also be the ideal platform for us to realise our expansion plans.”
– Rob Aberdein, the founder & CEO of Moray Group