Morgan Hunt sees increased productivity across board following move to Access Cloud Hosting

“I’d absolutely, definitely recommend Access. The support we’ve had from them over the course of the migration has been excellent.” - Andy Crow, Head of Support Services

About Morgan Hunt

Morgan Hunt is a public-sector recruiter. Founded in 1994, and focusing on the public-sector since 2001, they place people into the NHS, local government, further education and other corporate services roles.

The Challenge

• Legacy infrastructure that created several single points of failure, lost data and slowed down productivity across company
• Strict deadline to move out of existing data centre
• Small IT team, limited resources and knowledge around implementation process

Choosing Access

When Andy took on the management of the IT team at Morgan Hunt in early 2018 he was faced with an inadequate legacy system that was creating a lot of problems for the company.

"We had almost a critical situation, where a lot of our IT infrastructure was broken. We had our own datacentre with our own IT equipment in there, it was coming to end of life, things were breaking, hardware was failing, we didn’t have enough storage, back-ups were failing. We had a couple of really critical days where we lost data and had to restore from back-ups which caused issues with our live production environment."

Andy’s primary challenge was to keep the day-to-day operations of the company going, whilst considering how to improve their IT solutions overall.

"We knew we had to do something and our options were to go out and buy new kit, or to look at an alternative so we considered infrastructure as a service and went out with a tender process."

Andy and his team looked at a number of options and were thorough in their search for a hosting provider.

"We carried out a procurement process to pick up best of breed."

Prior to this procurement process, Morgan Hunt were already using a number of Access software products including payroll, HR and CRM solutions. Whilst they investigated a number of different providers, Andy says that both commercially and practically Access provided the best solution for them.

We knew the organisation and we knew that all of our products would be running on their infrastructure. We now have managed upgrades for all of our applications, which takes a lot of pressure off our internal IT team, and we knew we were going to be in safe hands. Commercially it worked as well so it was almost a no-brainer.

The Solution

• Access Cloud hosted infrastructure, implemented and supported by Access’ team of experts.

Benefits to the business

Morgan Hunt are extremely pleased with their decision in choosing Access as their hosting provider, as well as the supplier of their software solutions.

"We really like the products and I think that now Access are in the position where they manage all of these applications, it’s aligned our IT strategy."

By choosing Access, Morgan Hunt were able to achieve their initial goal of exiting their existing data centre and migrating onto a new cloud-based infrastructure.

We had to get out of our existing data centre in mid-April 2019, so we had a definite date to move. And we actually got there with time to spare."

Further to this the company have continued to see extensive benefits since migrating to Access’ managed hosting service.

"We are now in a situation where we have state of the art infrastructure, we have Access managing and looking after it for us. It’s scalable, as we grow as a business we can add storage, other facilities. We now have back-ups running regularly where we didn’t have them working correctly. We now have disaster recovery where we didn’t have disaster recovery. And we’ve now got a platform where we can actually build and deliver some of the really exciting projects we have in our pipeline."

Access also helped Morgan Hunt reduce resource demand within their IT team.

"We also used to outsource a lot of the infrastructure management and that’s now taken care of by Access. We’ve recently had a situation where due to holidays, we only had one IT person internally, and everything’s run absolutely fine. And I couldn’t be happier."

It isn’t only Andy who is happy with the improvements Access’ solution has brought about. Since migrating over to cloud hosting, the IT team at Morgan Hunt have been free to achieve more, thanks to the stability and efficiency the new infrastructure has brought to the company’s technology operations.

"We have a very small IT team within Morgan Hunt. Working closely with our suppliers, like Access, has meant that we are now in a situation where we have a really stable infrastructure to be able to deliver some of the projects that the team want to be able to deliver. We don’t have issues now with things like foul back-ups, or storage issues, it means that our applications run a lot faster."

In fact, the whole business has been feeling the benefits the solution has given Morgan Hunt. With a more efficient system, productivity gains have been seen across the company.

"We had issues before with a key piece of software, which would hang in certain searches, it would time out. All those searches and indexing now run really quickly. Even getting into some applications used to take many minutes and now it’s almost instant. So, it’s made a massive change in terms of productivity over the whole business."

The Results

• Managed implementation process delivered within deadline, with top-class support and technical knowledge
• Improved efficiency of applications running on stable, scalable cloud infrastructure
• Reduced unnecessary draw on IT resources, freeing IT team to achieve more

"The way I look at it is that Access were treating us as if we were their only client, and to me that was really exceptional service." - Andy Crow, Head of Support Services

Support

One of the areas where Access has proved themselves to be truly best of breed in cloud hosting is the support they have offered to Morgan Hunt.

Being familiar with Access, and the level of service we provide, allowed Andy to be confident in his choice of hosting provider from the outset.

"We’d never been through this before. It was very comforting having Access there to help and support us."

With a small team in charge of IT at Morgan Hunt, Access were able to provide valuable support and knowledge throughout the migration process.

Access worked closely with Morgan Hunt to ensure that the solution fitted their needs, as well as being implemented on time and to a standard that allowed Morgan Hunt to begin reaping the benefits from the system straightaway.

"Their technical knowledge has been brilliant, their passion for their product and the service they were delivering is something that really impressed me. They made sure we achieved this project within the timescales, and it really couldn’t have gone any better."

To Andy, the support provided by Access at every stage of the process, from procurement, through implementation and into ongoing services has been invaluable.

"The way I look at it is that they were treating us as if we were their only client, and to me that was really exceptional service."

"Access have been absolutely fantastic during the whole project. They’ve really supported the team who did the actual physical migration which was great because without that support the project would have failed." - Andy Crow, Head of Support Services

Request a Demo