Rusada sees increased productivity following move to Access Cloud Hosting
"Early in my career I experienced every IT manager’s worst nightmare –we lost a data backup. Having a cloud backup means we can test it and verify it, and if needed we can quickly and easily restore data." - Paul Coyne Head of Service Delivery
About Rusada
Rusada is an industry-leading provider of aviation software. With operations in the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, Rusada supports over 100 customers worldwide, managing a fleet of 2,000 fixed and rotary-wing aircraft. It's ENVISION software provides key information and oversight for aircraft operators, maintenance providers, and manufacturers.
Rusada’s on-premise servers were reaching end of life, and with IT hardware spread across 8 global offices, managing an on-premise infrastructure was proving to be a challenge, particularly when looking at supporting business growth.
Choosing Access
Rusada’s main objectives were to consolidate resources, make long-term cost savings, and create an infrastructure that would enable it to provide a hosting solution for its software customers. Not all of its customers have their own IT teams, so being able to provide its specialist software and a hosting solution for its customers was also a key consideration. This all added up to moving to a cloud environment. Rusada looked at several providers, and choosing the right partner was essential in supporting its continuing success. Rusada wanted a partner that was able to provide datacentre management, stringent security protocols and reliable environment management, along with a reliable data backup and recovery solution. It also needed a solution that had the flexibility to support its growth as an organisation. And to have all of its requirements provided by a single supplier was just what Rusada needed.
The Challenge
The key considerations for Rusada were being able to retain control over its IT environment and, more importantly, to have confidence that data backups and disaster recovery facilities were resilient enough to support its customers with minimum disruption to their service.
Benefits to the business
Working with Access gave Rusada confidence in its move to the cloud. Our engineers configured the environment to be resilient, so if there are any issues it doesn’t affect Rusada’s operations or its customers.
“The implementation and consolidation of our infrastructure was very well managed, with a lot of support from the Access engineers to ensure migrations were successful and had no risk of data loss.”
“We’re able to optimise our usage through the Access hosting management portal, and we can allocate resources to meet demand. Our IT is now fully managed, and we’re confident in the environment’s resilience and availability. The hosting provision is exactly as described, and we know what we’re getting for the cost.”
The Solution
Access provided a hosting environment designed around Rusada’s requirements. Providing a right-sized solution was important, as it would provide room to grow and add more in the future as needed. As well as their customer environments, Access was also able to host Rusada’s business IT systems, which are critical for its operational communications and collaboration.
Outcome
As a global organisation, Rusada works with customers and colleagues across the globe. Utilising shared resources across a cloud infrastructure has enabled the business to continue working in a relatively normal manner during the Covid-19 lockdown. “Moving to the Access Cloud platform means we can centrally manage our IT infrastructure. And, as with many organisations, we couldn’t predict the pandemic and its lockdown measures. But we found ourselves able to deal with enforced remote working much easier than if we had still had our IT on-premise. Being in the cloud already made it much simpler to quickly deploy and support a fully remote workforce.” For Paul, success was simple to measure. He saw a reduction in the number of physical servers, and a reduction in the time it takes to backup data and test it. There were cost savings in terms of power, security and cooling, which are now managed through the datacentre. A lot of the old equipment was coming to the end of its warranty, so instead of making a capital investment in new hardware, the business moved to an operational cost model through a monthly subscription for the services it used.
"Rusada values stability and performance, and the Access platform has consistently provided both. In our regular reviews, we assess capacity constraints and look ahead to ensure resources are available to meet future demand. This helps keep ticket numbers low, and customer satisfaction high." - Colin Livingston Enterprise Account Manager, Access Cloud Hosting