Client story TCM Living consolidates and standardises group-wide workforce and data technologies
By Insight UK / 8 Jul 2021
By Insight UK / 8 Jul 2021
TCM Living is a furniture manufacturer with five brands in its group. The brands were all using different versions of Microsoft Office, causing issues with collaboration, licensing and support. The company wanted to upgrade and futureproof its infrastructure, to improve efficiency and optimise its security posture.
Insight moved all TCM Living’s employees to Office 365, migrated its infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud, improved its security posture and helped to further improve efficiency with managed network service.
TCM Living faced several key challenges with its existing on-premise infrastructure.
The first was that the company’s brands were using different versions of Microsoft Office and had multiple separate Microsoft tenants and licences. As well as preventing employees from collaborating efficiently, the multiple technologies were also preventing from optimising licensing costs.
Further to this, the company’s on-premise infrastructure needed enhancing and future-proofing. TCM Living was expanding its furniture manufacturing business, but its legacy IT environment was making it difficult to scale and to accommodate new modern solutions. Meanwhile, new brands were joining the company, introducing yet more complexity.
The team at TCM Living was keen to ensure that any infrastructure upgrade would help to optimise data security. The company needed all brands to move to a consistent, modern IT environment that is scalable and secure, and easy for its IT department to manage.
“We were particularly impressed that each of Insight’s solutions went beyond fixing our initial problems and delivered more than we asked. The Azure cloud migration has enabled us to scale while at the same time improving security. The Office 365 migration has improved collaboration and is also saves on licensing, and enables scale up or down easily when we need to.”
Nik Hall, Chief Information Officer (CIO), TCM Living
Insight had already been working with TCM Living for more than 10 years, providing office equipment such as PCs and peripherals. This relationship laid the foundation for an expanded partnership, and TCM Living came to Insight for support with their infrastructure and IT consolidation project.
Insight began by running a Connected Workforce Discovery Workshop. This produced a clear picture of TCM Living’s requirements for the migration from on-premise Office to Microsoft Office 365. Based on these findings, Insight recommended a move to a cloud service provider (CSP) model, which would offer TCM Living the flexibility to scale up its business and add new users as required. Insight performed the migration on a brand-by-brand basis, ensuring the success of each one before moving to the next. The IT team now only have to manage a single Microsoft licensing agreement.
After the success of the initial project, TCM Living looked to Insight for support with moving their on-premise infrastructure to a single cloud environment, in Azure. Insight completed its Azure Scaffolding service, which migrated workloads from TCM Living’s on-premise hardware to Microsoft Azure. This move to the cloud provided TCM Living with a more enhanced, secure, and flexible infrastructure that boosts workload performance and is simpler to manage.
Insight’s Infrastructure Security Assessment boosted security even further and provided TCM Living with an understanding of its security posture in the cloud. As a result of the assessment, Insight installed Sophos software to optimise the company’s security posture.
TCM Living continues to look to Insight for support with IT issues, most recently requesting additional assistance managing its network across five brands at multiple sites. Following a six month trial, TCM Living now has Insight consultants working two to three days a week on-site to provide dedicated, specialist support.
All end users across the TCM Living group are now using the same technology which is held in the cloud, on an Azure environment. The IT team now has only one Microsoft licence agreement to manage.
The new cloud-based Azure environment is scalable and future-proof, as it can grow with the company. Costs are aligned to usage, so TCM Living doesn’t have to pay for more than it needs.
The Azure environment has improved workload performance, leading to efficiency gains, and enhanced security posture.
