WD Meats
Company Overview WD Meats is a family business with a long association to the livestock industry dating back more than 100 years. Founded...
Stafford Lynch
Company Overview
Stafford Lynch Limited, based in Ballycoolin, has been operating for almost 50 years and provides distribution, marketing and sales activation services to many industry sectors, including retail & grocery, food service, and pharmacy.
Stafford Lynch understands how crucial modern and robust IT is to their operations and in order to optimise the efficiency of their operations, the company has invested heavily in upgrading their technology. As they provide a multitude of support services to their customers, including inventory management, demand planning and forecasting any downtime would have a severe impact on their business operations.
The Challenge
Following an internal review, supported by Ken Ryan of Valorem Consulting, Stafford Lynch realised their organically grown infrastructure was no longer fit for purpose and needed a full IT review. They had multiple partners providing reactive services and the business wanted the best holistic solution from one partner. Following a tender process, Stafford Lynch opted for Outsource Group who were able to provide a range of products and services that matched their road map.
A full review of the current infrastructure was carried out on hardware, software and other technology solutions to determine what additional solutions were available and better suited the needs of the business, to ensure it was performing optimally.
The objective of the project was to provide a reliable, secure, and supported modern IT estate, enabling the highest levels of system availability to underpin the continuous operations of the business. Outsource Group recommended adopting a cloud operating model to ensure business continuity, enhance agility, and future-proof their IT operations. This transition reduced the need for on-premise infrastructure and emphasized secure and efficient network connections to cloud-based services.
Actions
The Managed Service was designed using a defence in depth approach, providing multiple layers of protection for all IT assets. This comprehensive support included a highly secure and integrated core infrastructure, a fully integrated service desk, hardware and software updates, and full disaster recovery. With a dedicated lease line for stable connectivity, the server farm was moved to the cloud, allowing for increased availability and scalability. The hosted firewall further improved disaster recovery, ensuring continuous operation even in case of hardware or application failure.
The business had been using a legacy Windows environment that required upgrading. Outsource Group prioritized updating the system to a supported version and onboarding new and current devices into the OMS. All devices including mobile devices are now leveraging MS Intune MDM solution to ensure consistency and protection of endpoints via compliance profiles and policies. Additionally, the backend infrastructure, mail clients, and servers were upgraded. Through meticulous planning, Outsource Group migrated all accounts and data to a new cloud tenant with minimal disruption and downtime, ensuring all software and devices were updated to supported versions of operating and security systems.
Technology Used
- Managed Service
- OSG Cloud
- Hosted Firewall
- Windows Upgrade
- Mobile Device Management
- Data Migration
- Dedicated Lease Line
Outcome
Stafford Lynch required a strategically positioned cloud infrastructure to support their expansion plans and server requirements for security, scalability, and high availability. By transitioning to OSG Cloud, the need for on-premise physical servers and future infrastructure refreshes has been eliminated. This move provided Stafford Lynch with a highly available environment, removing the need for additional physical servers, licenses, or backup infrastructure for business continuity and disaster recovery. OSG Cloud deployed redundancy measures for cloud, switching, firewalls, and leased lines.
The transformation project involved a complete IT infrastructure refresh and a fully managed IT service, including cloud services. It also included an integrated service desk, software and hardware updates, full disaster recovery, and a highly secure IT infrastructure. The entire project was completed within a 6-month period without any downtime for the business.
Results
- Increased Security & Monitoring
- Reduced downtime Reinforced
- Reliable back up
- Enhanced scalability
- Modernised IT estate
- Infrastructure
- Increased efficiency with Fast
“We are excited to partner with Outsource Group and have full confidence that their expertise and solutions will enable us to enhance our services to customers and continue our growth in the Irish FMCG industry. We tendered across the island of Ireland and felt Outsource Group put together an outstanding proposal that adds significant value to our business.”
– Triona Kelly, Head of Finance & IT, Stafford Lynch
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