Advania UK logo  Advania UK logo compact

CASE STUDY

Ribby Hall Village: complete digital transformation

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.

Working in partnership with Ribby Hall for almost 20 years

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.

Services

Professional Services
Managed Services
Support
Azure
Microsoft Support
Teams Voice
Licensing
Cloud Migration

Industry

Leisure and Hospitality

Organisation size

620 employees

Completion Date

Summer 2021

Challenge

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.

Approach

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.

Solution

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.

Outcomes

  • Collaboration is encouraged and facilitated
  • Technology that is easy to use for all employees
  • Greater security for their systems
  • Futureproofing where possible through cloud technologies
  • Successful adoption of the new tools means users benefit from the added value
  • Cost-effective technology and additional functionality where possible

The Future

Ensuring that the employees got excited about the new technologies and ways of working means that Ribby Hall is able to continue to explore better and more efficient ways of working using the Microsoft tools available.

This is just the start of Ribby Hall’s journey. As users adopt more of the Microsoft tools and see the benefits of SharePoint Online and Teams, Ribby Hall is able to distinguish areas in which would improve their efficiencies.

This means future planning around technology no longer only lies with the IT department, but with all users who are adopting such technologies.

"Advania guided us through the whole process and went above and beyond to get the project over the line. The benefits of the project were significant."

Steven Lonsdale

IT Manager

Ribby Hall Village

Products and Services

  • Microsoft Azure to host workloads as IaaS
  • Landing Zone built in Microsoft Azure
  • SharePoint Online
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Microsoft Teams Voice
  • Anywhere365

"The digital transformation project was one of the larger technical undertakings Ribby Hall has faced. The benefits of the project were significant; safeguarding us from the upcoming ISDN switch off through the migration to Teams telephony, migration to a more manageable OpEx billing model with Azure and other associated Microsoft 365 licensing."

Steven Lonsdale

IT Manager

Ribby Hall Village

Our Impact

Take a look at some of the results that stood out for Ribby Hall.

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

Encouraged and facilitated easy collaboration

Let’s find out how we can help you

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.

Related Reading

Discover how we helped a large university campus migrate to a hybrid cloud environment to bring their technology offering on par with their extensive academic record.
Take a look at how we helped The AA, one of Britain's oldest motoring associations, offer a modern motoring experience with the support of our expert governance, risk and compliance (GRC) consultancy services.
See how we helped a provider serve one million learners with a highly available, scalable platform that met both existing and growing demands without issue.
MANAGED IT SERVICES