Golf & Country Clubs Case Study

Green Grass Golf Group a UK based group that have acquired a number of golf and country clubs throughout England over the past few years and they have high expectation of adding more to their portfolio over the next few years. They have a vision within the industry to provide the highest quality and great members experience and to do this they have committed to ensuring that the IT systems that they use are giving their staff and members the performance and security that they require.

The Commercial Need
The Green Grass Golf Group needed to standardise their business practices across all of their sites and this included the IT infrastructure. This was to ensure that the current sites were secure and efficient but also to allow fast growth with a cost effective and secure foot print that they could roll out to new sites when they came on board. They needed reliability and full visibility of the IT environment, with security being top priority for both internal business use and members access. A key point that was highlighted was that the email had to be accessible 24×7 and from any location across the world and that all data should be securely managed and backed up with a fully managed disaster recovery strategy in place.

The Technical Challenges
The current platforms were unreliable and regularly the network performance was slow. This was impacted by poor internet access that was restricting their day to day running of the club and the options that were open to them for cloud and disaster recovery solutions. As the sites had been acquired from different companies, the hardware and software that they had inherited was in various states of working order and there was no easy way to secure the network and increase performance. The amount of disturbance to the business was to be kept to a minimum as they were working to a number of critical deadlines.

How Did Reliable Networks Help?
Reliable Networks conducted a full system audit over all sites and gave the business a full report of the hardware and software that they had and also an overview of the internet requirement and what was available. A strategy was put in place to enable a PC refresh over the next 3 years which highlighted priority machines to replace and also allowed clear visibility that made budgeting easier and leasing options were reviewed. The machines that needed to be, were replaced straight away by Reliable Networks whilst current hardware that could be, was utilised as much as possible so that there was no duplication in the work that was required across the whole network.

It was agreed that a leased line would be installed at one of the sites and that this would be configured to allow secure internet access to 3 separate networks on the site. This was going to allow a secure and fast internet service to allow a cloud email solution, online backups and secure remote access.

An IT Support package was agreed that would give the business a fully monitored 24×7 IT support function with unlimited access to the London based helpdesk. We installed our Remote Management and Monitoring software on all devices across the network and within 2 hours we had fully managed Antivirus and Antimalware on all workstations and servers and all machines were updated to the latest patches and service packs. Once this was done we ran through the optimisation process on all machines to get the machines performing to their optimum potential and this was set to be done on a weekly basis. This was all done without any down time or interruption to the staff or members. We then migrated all email accounts to Office 365 and installed to give them the cloud email and file sharing solution, the new applications and did the swap over out of hours so that there was no impact to the business. Password policies were put in place and documentation distributed to keep everyone updated on the new systems and the progress that was being made.

An analysis was done on the current data file structure and the data was centralised and shared securely. A fully managed and monitored online backup solution was configured and scheduled to run at un-intrusive times throughout the day and night. The data recovery procedure is tested regularly to prove that the data is available and in a good state to allow recovery at any time should it be required. The server was configured with an imaging solution that would enable it to be recovered within minutes without any installation or configuration required should there be a disaster.

How Did Reliable Networks Meet the Expectations of Green Grass Golf?
From the initial conversation, through-out installation and implementation, to expansion and the on-going support, Reliable Networks have offered an incredibly professional and efficient service. Green Grass Golf have acquired three large golf and country club venues within the space of two years, all of which had very different levels of IT infrastructure. Without an in-house IT specialist, this made the company’s vision, desire and necessity of having a safe, secure and fast centralised IT system, a very difficult task. Reliable Networks quickly and methodically brought our IT infrastructure up to a level that not only ensured a secure network environment at each site, for both our staff and members, but also ensured that a plan was put in place to easily allow for future expansion and connectivity of numerous sites.” Group Director of Golf, Green Grass Golf Ltd.

Gregory Olczyk

Gregory Olczyk