Morgan Hunt’s moves away from broken legacy infrastructure with Access Cloud hosting

Gaz Masud, is Head of IT at Morgan Hunt. As the lead on the migration of Morgan Hunt’s systems onto a cloud-based infrastructure, Gaz found Access’ support and technical expertise invaluable in ensuring a smooth and timely implementation. Since implementing the new infrastructure Gaz and his small team have seen a number of improvements in the performance and stability of their internal systems, as well as having freed up resources for the team to work on development projects that will allow the company to continue to achieve more.

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 system, limited capacity with no potential to scale or undertake new development projects
• Multiple single points of failure, high risk of business-critical issues
• Performance issues leading to a lack of confidence in the IT team from the wider company

Broken systems, low confidence

Gaz joined Morgan Hunt in February 2018, as their Head of IT. He has a broad remit which covers overseeing daily operations as well as researching and managing future improvements.

"My responsibilities are to ensure the day to day operations of the IT team. Also, I manage the internal IT service desk, as well as the outsource service desk. My responsibilities include availability of all systems, making sure they’re performing as they should as well as getting involved in strategic decision making, making sure that the Morgan Hunt has fit for purpose systems for IT."

Gaz joined Morgan Hunt in February 2018, as their Head of IT. He has a broad remit which covers overseeing daily operations as well as researching and managing future improvements.

Early into his time with the company, Gaz recognised that the current systems were not fit for purpose.

"Following a discovery session, I realised there were quite a few things that were not in place. There was no disaster recovery, no business continuity plan, systems were running out of capacity in terms of compute and resource."

As well as placing Morgan Hunt’s operations at risk of major failures or critical situations, the low performance of the legacy system was impacting productivity across the company and impacting Gaz and his team’s relationships with their colleagues.

"The end users were getting frustrated with the slow performance of systems and generally, I think they’d lost confidence in the team as well, so my role was to get that all sorted out."

The Solution

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

Infrastructure that fits your purpose

Alongside colleague Andy Crow, Head of Support services, Gaz undertook a thorough procurement process, looking for top-class cloud hosting solutions. Access came out on top of this process.

The Access’ team’s technical knowledge and top-class support were a key factor in the decision to pursue Access Cloud Hosting as their infrastructure solution of choice.

"The team itself had a good technical understanding of what we wanted and we just felt that their vision aligned with Morgan Hunt’s. We felt going forward it would be a good fit in that sense, so we opted for private cloud and a lot of the decisions were based around the offerings, the experience as well as the overall fit."

This was proven to be an excellent decision for Gaz and Morgan Hunt. Both the solution and the support offered by Access have been extremely successful and well received throughout the company.

"They helped us overcome a lot of the performance issues we had, in terms of an improved infrastructure, as well as the services around that provision."

As well as implementing a fit for purpose infrastructure within a precise timeline, Access have helped Gaz to address the issues he identified early in his tenure.

"In terms of the overall resilience we had multiple single points of failure, they’ve all been addressed, and our performance is a lot quicker, we’ve got disaster recovery, and a reliable back up platform."

The benefits of the system have been felt outside the IT team as well, with improved performance having a positive impact on the wider company’s operations and productivity.

"We’ve noticed a huge improvement in performance of our applications. There’s something called the job index search which previously would take up to two minutes and would on occasion time out. Now it actually works, and it takes less than 10 seconds which is a big thing."

"Having used Access products in the past, it was a good fit for the business in terms of Access’ roadmap and where they were going." - Gezanfar Masud, Head of IT

Technical expertise that helps you achieve more

As lead on the migration project, and with minimal in-house resources, Gaz relied on Access’ support to implement a smooth, successful migration to the new infrastructure.

Gaz worked closely with the Access team and greatly benefitted from their expertise in the infrastructure arena. As well as supporting the initial implementation, the skills and knowledge Access were able to share with Gaz will have a great impact in the future.

"For me I’ve created some good relationships with the team, I do come from an infrastructure background, so I’ve got quite a good understanding with what was involved but I’ve learnt a lot from the guys there. And going forward that should help me."

Morgan Hunt had to exit their existing data centre within a specific timeline, which meant that the timely execution of the project was imperative. With limited in-house resources to drive the project, Gaz would have struggled to deliver the migration without the extensive support he received from Access.

"The main support was where I had grey areas or gaps in my knowledge, namely around networking. The Access team had a great networking team, they took ownership of a lot of the issues, and helped deliver."

Working so closely with Access, Gaz was able to develop really good working relationships with the team meaning that Morgan Hunt and Access could work in partnership to ensure the implementation went well, and that Morgan Hunt ended up with a system that addressed all the issues Gaz had identified and was truly fit for purpose to serve the company’s growing needs.

"Anything you throw at them they don’t panic which is good, and they’re really professional, courteous and anything you ring them up with they try their best to sort it out for you there and then... There were a few issues that were outside of Access’s remit, which even though they were out of scope Access stepped in and helped us out, which is great from a supplier and a partner."

"Access were really helpful on a technical level, because Morgan Hunt is limited in terms of resource of the IT team, they filled in a lot of the gaps where we had skills gaps." - Gezanfar Masud, Head of IT

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