Hilson Moran is a multi-disciplinary engineering consultancy with offices in the UK and Middle East. The business plans, designs, manages and operates built assets for a range of customers. It employs more than 250 people across five offices in the UK and Middle East.
Challenge: Always-on access to applications
Hilson Moran’s portfolio of work includes some of the most prestigious projects in the hottest construction markets. These include the provision of building services for the 2012 Olympic Village in London, 30 St Mary Axe (The Gherkin), 20 Fenchurch Street (The Walkie Talkie) and the masterplan to a community of 50,000 residents off the coast of Abu Dhabi.
“The business needs IT to deliver the solutions that allow our engineers to do their job effectively,” said Lee Beckford, Hilson Moran’s Head of IT. “My priority is to safeguard our data. To keep it safe and to keep it accessible.”
Beckford has a 10-year plan to transform Hilson Moran’s approach to IT. The plan is in three stages, with the ultimate goal of moving everything to the cloud. “This first step is to centralise our IT infrastructure at the London office,” he said. “We want zero-branch IT.”
Centralisation would allow Beckford to refresh hardware, address support issues – particularly to remote offices – and improve the back-up and restoration of data: “We need to optimise support to branch offices. Qatar and UAE, for instance, have a Sunday-Thursday working week and it is essential we can fix issues from the UK on a Sunday. Also, data back-ups were not being done as rigorously as required.”
For centralisation to work, Beckford needed maximum efficiency from the Hilson Moran network. “We want staff to be highly mobile and to be able to work from anywhere. We need the network to support collaboration, for colleagues to be able to send and access large CAD files wherever, whenever.”
Solution: The ideal opportunity to optimise
“I’ve always been aware of Riverbed Technology’s WAN optimisation capabilities,” said Beckford. “This project was my first opportunity to use them.” The opening of a new Hilson Moran office in Qatar focused attentions on a deadline. “I knew I didn’t want to put server hardware in there, hardware we’d struggle to support and end up needing to replace in three years,” said Beckford. “I wanted us future-proofed.”
In each remote office location Hilson Moran deployed Riverbed SteelFusion, a software-defined edge solution that delivers unprecedented data security, business continuity, IT agility and end-user productivity to distributed enterprises. SteelFusion enabled IT to be removed from remote offices, converging the edge infrastructure to the main data centre.
All back-ups are now completed via the London office and centralising services to the UK has enabled more operational control, reduced complexity and improved data security.
Integrated with SteelFusion, Riverbed SteelHead optimises the WAN, accelerates application delivery and reduces bandwidth use. In addition, Riverbed SteelHead Mobile extends optimisation for staff working outside the office to ensure they can be equally productive, regardless of location.
With the new appliances commissioned in advance, the installation was completed in days. “It was effectively plug-and-play and the user-interface is very intuitive,” said Beckford. “We went up to the Manchester office to oversee the original install, but we could manage Abu Dhabi and Doha by using a local team on a video conference to Farnborough; it was that straightforward.
“We could see the optimisation taking place, file by file. The new Middle East servers were up and running within minutes.” Riverbed also helped address Hilson Moran’s concerns around support in the Middle East. “Because of the critical nature of our work, I made it clear we needed rock-solid support. No support solution, no contract,” said Beckford. “Riverbed helped address this by introducing Zycko to work with us on the installation and ongoing support in the Middle East.”
Benefits: Cost, culture and morale
SteelFusion allows Hilson Moran to virtualise remote physical servers into the main data centre. All remote data and applications are now controlled centrally, meaning branch IT can be scaled up and down when needed, without the need for remote IT staff. And all of this is accomplished while optimising application performance for users at each site.
“Thanks to the Riverbed solution, stage one of our 10-year plan is now complete,” said Beckford. “With Riverbed SteelFusion, Hilson Moran’s IT infrastructure is now centralised at the London head office. The Riverbed solution has positively impacted cost, culture and morale.”
“In terms of network efficiency, we were paying £250,000 (US$310,400) for a 5mb line into the Qatar office – around the same price as the 100mb we need for the whole of the UK,” he said. “It’s early days, but it looks like we’re only using 20% of our bandwidth.”
With a zero-branch IT set-up, energy and air conditioning costs will also be lower. The Manchester office is due to relocate in 2017, when there will be less floor space needed for IT, freeing more space for client services. This also leads to savings on procuring, supporting and maintaining branch IT.
In the future, new branch set up can be smaller and IT will be quicker to provision. “As a business, we’re now even more secure, more agile and more flexible,” Beckford said. “Riverbed enables us to backup between sites, using a couple of Network Attached Storage boxes.
“We’d budgeted £60,000 (US$74,500) for backup and we’re probably only spending £5,000 (US$6,200). Data security is critical. Many of the tenders we’re going for require us to have a robust approach to security – for example, Building Information Modelling level 2, where it’s unacceptable for files to be stored locally on a laptop.”
Now, Hilson Moran employees can send and access files held centrally. “Staff can work out of the office, on site, with a client. We can move data faster and with more resilience,” said Hilson Moran CFO Roger Waters-Duke.
“Even in locations with thin broadband, SteelHead Mobile allows staff to access the files they need. Any actions made on site or with a client can then be actioned back in the office. Centralisation enabled by SteelFusion means we’re all working off the latest files.”
This immediately improves client work and Hilson Moran’s ability to bring the right specialists into projects, when they’re needed. “We have core skills, but it may be that we need to bring in specialists in acoustics or fire protection or vertical transport,” said Beckford. “It is far easier to collaborate and create flexible project teams with a strong network. We can be more agile in the way we address projects.”
Essentially, Hilson Moran applications now perform better. SteelFusion centralises all of the company
data, while eliminating infrastructure dependencies at remote sites and still delivering optimal application performance for users wherever they may be in the world.
For instance, the Riverbed solution optimises traffic from the Microsoft Exchange servers. For end-users, this means when they open their email, messages are displayed quickly, rather than taking a long time to download, improving productivity.
Finance, security and application performance aside, Beckford said the biggest impact has been among the IT team. “The engagement with Riverbed and support from Zycko means we are better able to support the Middle East offices and other users, which has freed up a huge amount of time.
“We’re better able to support the business on new projects and commit to delivery deadlines. In particular, we have the time to figure out the business benefit of any IT project. There is no point implementing something that doesn’t benefit our business.”
This last point is key to Beckford’s long-term strategy. Implementing the combination of SteelHead and SteelFusion has produced clear business benefits; in addition, it has demonstrated to the Hilson Moran board that the IT team can deliver a major IT project on time and to budget.
This makes it easier to make the case for further investment. “We have a fantastic relationship with Riverbed. It doesn’t feel like a working relationship, it has been a partnership. The Riverbed team has shown an interest in what we’re trying to achieve overall and at every stage, they’ve looked to help.
It was the first time a third party had delivered what they had promised, on time, to budget and ahead of expectations. “We’re looking at more remote working, device refreshes, becoming a paperless office and greater use of the cloud,” said Beckford. “The successful completion of stage one of our 10-year strategy, with the support of Riverbed, gives us a platform on which to build.”
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