CASE STUDY
The family-owned holiday complex welcomes tens of thousands of visitors a year – but it had reached a stall in its IT operations due to legacy equipment and software. Discover how we helped them renew their digital transformation.
Advania has supported Ribby Hall as it grew both in operations and services on offer at
the village with advice on how technologies could assist both customers and employees.
Ribby Hall eventually reached a point where its digital transformation had slowed down
due to legacy equipment and software.
Industry:
Leisure and hospitality
Organisation size:
620 employees
Solutions:
Azure & cloud, digital employee experience, unified communications
Completion date:
Summer 2021
With Ribby Hall operating a more traditional buy-and-host, on-premises operating model, there was a need to review options to help Ribby Hall transform by adopting cloud technologies, as well as encourage collaboration across the Village, while maintaining a high level of security.
We’d been exploring the benefits of moving to the cloud for some time – but there were some concerns. One reservation was around poor connectivity in the local area. When this improved, we undertook considerable work to improve bandwidth, resiliency and technology prior to doing any work on moving to Azure.
The biggest challenge was user adoption and the ‘buy-in’ from employees, which we acknowledged by sharing the possibilities of Microsoft 365 and its apps with key stakeholders from around the business.
While we could see the potential to add real value to the day-to-day activities, it was clear that without careful planning and successful adoption from users, this value would be lost in the longer-term.
The current hardware and infrastructure had reached, or were coming to, an age where change needed to happen. The question at this point to Ribby Hall was: do you refresh what you have and remain on-premises or do you look at an alternative design encompassing cloud computing?
We carried out a ‘5 Rs’ cloud rationalisation assessment on the current VMware estate to look at what we would want to replace, rehost, redesign, remain or retire. Following this we undertook a Cloud Adoption Framework type assessment for both right-sizing of workloads and understanding the best type of service for them in Azure.
We quickly moved on to an Azure design that included a Landing Zone to give better security, governance and reporting, then looking at which servers we would migrate to Azure, which applications we would move to SaaS or external hosting, and which servers we could retire.
During the height of Covid, Ribby Hall had invested in an Azure migration, Teams Voice (with Anywhere365 Contact Centre) as well as a SharePoint Online migration.
As part of the SharePoint migration, we consulted to evaluate what files and folders would be migrated and make sure that these were in a format and structure ready for migration. After some minor remedial work to tidy things up and restructure, we undertook the migration over a weekend, moving the full corporate data structure to SharePoint Online.
Once the move to Teams Voice was agreed, our telephony team, in conjunction with Sipcom, implemented the design, ready for user acceptance testing.
Steven Lonsdale
IT Manager, Ribby Hall Village
With a strong focus on momentum, agility and futureproofing its business, Tysers continues to work with Advania to deliver its digital transformation into the coming years.
The ongoing services and support we provide are designed to ensure Tysers continues to adapt as it evolves, enabling the organisation to focus on being a data-driven, digital-first and digital-forward business.
Kick-starting its digital transformation also means systems and technologies inherited through any future acquisitions, can be quickly and efficiently integrated.
Encouraged and facilitated easy collaboration
Ease of management for the internal IT team
Ensured user adoption of the new tools to benefit from the value added
Steven Lonsdale
IT MANAGER, RIBBY HALL VILLAGE
Whether you’re facing similar challenges to peers across your industry, or you have a unique need for something different – speak to us to find out what we can do.
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