Bathgate

About the Bathgate Group

The Bathgate Group of companies specialises in areas such as silica sand, bulk powder haulage, manufacture and installation of raised access flooring, and business finance solutions.

Chris Snape, Group IT Manager at the Bathgate Group, talks to us about his decision to move Bathgate’s IT infrastructure onto the Access Cloud Hosting platform.

Prior to migrating to the Access Cloud Hosting Platform, Bathgate had a mix of hosted and on-premise servers and systems. With its incumbent hosting provider switching datacentres, Bathgate had an opportunity to rethink the hosting provision for the business, narrowing down its options to three:

1. Stay where they were: Sporadic slowness and occasional downtime were impacting the business, and the capital cost of reinvesting in the hardware was something Bathgate wanted to move away from.
2. Bring the hosting in-house: While building infrastructure could be achieved, there would still be the issue of capital expenditure and reinvesting in hardware when it reached the end of life. The skills and knowledge required to design, build and maintain an internal hosted infrastructure would also have impacted Chris’s team fundamentally - rather than focusing on projects to support the long-term growth strategy for Bathgate, the team would have had to become engineers to keep the systems running.
3. Find an alternative provider: This would mean starting from scratch, but also meant Chris could work with an expert team to assess the fragmented set-up of on-premise and hosted systems, and redefine Bathgate’s IT architecture.

Choosing Access Cloud Hosting

Access was an existing supplier providing Bathgate with its supply chain software so it made sense to include Access in the process. The decision to go with Access was made based on a combination of cost, service level, support and professionalism.

“While the price was important, Access offered extra benefits that other providers could not. The support and expertise took some of the more stressful tasks away from us. The architecture of the solution suited us much better and gave me peace of mind that our business is in the hands of experts. We no longer have to rely on keeping our own knowledge up to date to keep the system running, which means we can focus on business-critical projects.”

The most compelling reason to switch to the Access platform was the architecture. Previously, Bathgate had to purchase, maintain and upgrade hardware housed in the datacentre at their cost. Now, rather than purchasing the dedicated kit, Bathgate pays for the dedicated resource. Access has taken on the responsibility of maintaining and upgrading the hardware, and any issues impacting Bathgate’s environment would be quickly resolved by moving its data to another server set up. It was the simplicity of this solution that appealed to Chris.

“One of the biggest risks at the time was downtime. A catastrophic failure in the previous set-up would have had a huge impact on our operations. If the hardware failed, we wouldn’t be able to use our data until we’d purchased replacement equipment, set it all up again and restored our data from backups. We could have been without our data for weeks and this was not a risk I wanted to continue to hang over us.”

With the Access Cloud platform, a critical hardware failure isn’t a worry anymore. Bathgate now has a dedicated resource provision, not dedicated equipment, so if anything does go wrong with the hardware, Access simply moves its data with no interruption or downtime.

“We now have offsite replication, which means that if the primary datacentre goes down, we automatically go live in the secondary datacentre. Having the reassurance that the risk of downtime was minimised was really important.”

The impact on the business of moving to the Access Cloud platform

Moving to an architecture that’s managed separately from the internal processes meant Chris and his team could refocus their priorities, knowing that the hardware was managed, monitored, and maintained by Access.

“Rather than focusing on the architecture and hardware, I can now focus on the domain level processes and systems within the business. Everything is accessible from one platform, and the VM Cloud Director is a great portal to use.”

The risk of hardware failure has been removed as part of phase one of the VM migration, and Chris can now implement phase two and restructure his VMs and data. Downtime issues have disappeared, resulting in greater reliability of Bathgate’s systems.

“Knowing the hardware and datacentre are fully managed and maintained by dedicated engineers gives me peace of mind. I also don’t have to worry about catastrophic data loss, as our backup measures are excellent.”

Bathgate has already seen another clear advantage of moving to the Access Cloud platform.

“We had a planned power outage which meant we had no power in the office for 3 hours. Previously, this would have meant everyone would have just had to stop working. But with the cloud solution in place, office staff could access the cloud via battery backup, and those working from home were able to continue uninterrupted. It’s been a major benefit that we’ve seen straight away.”

As well as providing an architecture that meets Bathgate’s requirements, Access also keeps in regular contact with Chris to monitor the service, and discuss new technologies and innovations that can help Bathgate scale for growth.

Tony Woods, Access Cloud Hosting account manager says of working with Chris and the Bathgate team:

“Working with Chris to set up Bathgate’s new architecture has been great. There were clear expectations from the start and designing a solution that met all of the requirements was key to delivering this project successfully. Maintaining regular contact with Chris is really important so we can discuss how we can support his plans for the future.”

To find out more about how Access Cloud Hosting can transform your IT infrastructure, speak to one of our consultants.