Frogmore is the UK’s most prolific real estate fund manager, responsible for managing private equity real estate funds for investors all over the world. The team of 32 – based both in the office and at remote locations – need to be able to communicate and collaborate efficiently with others. This includes their colleagues and institutional investors around the globe. It’s imperative that team members fully understand investor requirements for UK real estate, and are able to deliver exceptional solutions in a timely manner.
As part of Frogmore’s commitment to unrivalled collaboration and communication, it was determined that the organisation would benefit from embracing more digital solutions. This would not only allow for the rollout of more streamlined business processes, but would also help the company to reduce their IT costs. Frogmore reached out to us here at Reliable for support in reimagining the way IT is delivered across the organisation. After learning more about their requirements, a solution became clear: a full digital transformation and data migration project.
After discussing the needs of all users, and the requirements of the company as a whole, we agreed that we needed to approach the situation from two distinct angles.
The first was to focus on implementing immediate changes that would bring direct value to Frogmore’s team. This would include the migration of public cloud-hosted services, such as file management, virtual desktop, and multiple business applications into a Microsoft 365-hosted environment. Access to SharePoint online, local working, and SaaS-based solutions such as Intune would be provided.
The second angle was to focus on longer-term value, ensuring that Frogmore was able to maintain the benefits of its digital transformation far into the future. This would involve the creation of a brand new data loss prevention (DLP) strategy from scratch to ensure that powerful measures were in place to secure all data being stored and accessed in the cloud.
The biggest challenge with undertaking a project such as this is often the magnitude of it. Frogmore required a complete digital overhaul, which, if approached all at once, would likely have resulted in significant disruption and upheaval for the team. It was critical that we carried out this project discreetly with minimal impact on day-to-day operations. We therefore decided to approach this as a multi-stage project. Tasks would be broken down into three stages spanning a six-month period.
During stage 1, we focused on migrating existing files and data to SharePoint Online and OneDrive before transferring these files to cloud backups. This stage took longer than initially anticipated, due to the need to liaise closely with third parties as part of migrating legacy applications and file types.
In stage 2, it was time to focus on creating a full governance and compliance policy, as well as a new data loss prevention policy. It was important to ensure the seamless implementation of those policies, and to achieve this, we made use of platforms such as InTune.
Stage 3 involved undertaking a full infrastructure decommission and migration to a combination of local working services and SaaS-based solutions. This required a comprehensive plan for the public cloud, virtual desktop, and network architecture. We achieved this by leveraging the existing services available through our own Reliable 365 platform, and the business premium suite of services.
With a full decommission of a costly public cloud-hosted environment, Frogmore uncovered an annual saving of around £70,000 in ongoing IT costs. In addition, the organisation found that the transformation helped them to better secure their sensitive business data. Employees were also engaging more closely with IT services, resulting in enhanced internal and external collaboration.
“Our digital transformation with a serverless approach to the way IT is delivered for us has
been a game-changer. It’s increased our agility, saved costs, and improved our security.
The solution delivered by Reliable and their dedication to delivering this project in an engaging
and collaborative way made it a smooth journey, and we couldn’t be happier with the results”.
Ben Lester, IT manager at Frogmore
46-48 East Smithfield,
London, E1W 1AW.
Reliable Networks is an established Cyber security and IT services company based in central London. Formed in 2004 by the current MD Paul Fisher, with the notion of providing first-class IT support and security services we have grown steadily year on year through word of mouth and referrals. We have a great understanding of business and its Cyber security and IT requirements, which means that the solutions that we recommend will be scalable and provide you with systems that allow your staff to perform to their optimum.
