This first appeared in the Orange Rag newsletter out on 26 September
Another firm is moving their tin off premises, as towards the end of September we got this exclusive announcement from Converge TS: “After an extensive selection process Seddons has selected Converge TS to provide a fully managed private hosted infrastructure solution, creating a secure, high performance environment to deliver the firm’s suite of applications.”
We spoke to IT director James Temple (pictured) about the move. Our thanks to James for chatting while on holiday in Miami, on his birthday to boot. He told us: “We already utilise Office 365 and cloud services for our backup and disaster recovery so having successfully proved that it is a platform we wanted to use, we decided to move our entire infrastructure to a merged service provider. We went to market and spoke to a number of organisations and ended up selecting Converge as they not only provide the platform we’re after in terms of infrastructure but also have a detailed level of expertise around the core business applications we use at the firm and can ensure we have a platform that performs well, is scalable, enables us to expand our flexible working and supports the core applications across our business.
“The decision to go with a merged services was probably for economic reasons more than anything else: we get from a functional perspective everything we need including great redundancy and security but it also provides the flexibility we need to scale up and down as the business grows. To go down a completely private route wasn’t on the cards.
“Having utilised other cloud services we’ve managed to get the business comfortable with using these types of service and to provide the same security and availability internally I would struggle within the same budget. These companies spend far beyond my budget and all we’re doing is benefiting from the economies of scale across multiple organisations.
“I wouldn’t say this is public, it’s a managed service – a set of dedicated servers in Converge’s data centre. So you rent a set of services and a load of computing power from Converge.
“But it’s a step before Azure or AWS and already means that you’re moving towards that world. The point is with these guys that you have people dedicated to you that you have close contact with and that know your infrastructure and applications. You’re buying that extra layer of support you wouldn’t get with a public cloud.
“Re performance, we haven’t gone live yet and have a detailed set of benchmarking against our current level of performance in our on premises world and before we sign off to go live, we’ll make sure this infrastructure delivers benefits.
“This is a major leap towards the cloud for us.”
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