Great London Hospitality - Cloud Migration Case Study

The multi-award-winning Hotel Operator, Great London Hospitality (GLH) is the largest hotel owner-operator in London. It’s impressive portfolio boasts 14 amazing hotels featuring 5,000 bedrooms and 130 event spaces. A people- centric organisation, GLH strives to provide the ultimate customer experience.
 

“We simply couldn’t have achieved this without the platform, experience and guidance from Atech.” – Jairo Montes, Head of Infrastructure, GLH
 

The Problem

Creating smart hotels with a high-tech customer experience just doesn’t work with an ageing, fragmented infrastructure. Being an industry leader requires you to remain on top of your game at all times. GLH earned its position through the consistent delivery of great hospitality, which was made possible by the technology foundations underpinning its organisation.
 

Over time, GLH’s organic growth created a fragmented infrastructure, with some elements on-premise, others in co-location data centres and the rest hosted with AWS. This disjointed service started to have a big impact on the business.
 

Besides the high running costs, technical outages were starting to impact the customer experience and the volume of personal data held within the organisation created security concerns.
 

These issues were only intensifying…
 

The industry as a whole is moving towards ‘smart’ hotels, where guests expect a high-tech hotel experience through added benefits, such as digital check-in, key- less room entry and in-room apps. However, despite wanting a richer digital experience, research suggests that three-quarters of travellers have privacy concerns over the technology needed to meet their demands.
 

To retain its leadership status, GLH needed to update the infrastructure that would enable its business to transform for the new digital era.

Expectations

• Consolidate the existing infrastructure.
• Optimise for greater cost savings.
• Secure customer data and ensure ongoing regulatory compliance.

Key Outcomes

• 30% saving in the first year following migration to Azure. £800k saving over 3 years.
• Robust security and compliance.

Secure Cloud Migration for smarter customer service

Process

As a leading Azure Cloud Service Provider (CSP), Atech used its tried and tested methodology to plan, implement and mitigate risk, while consolidating and migrating GLH’s infrastructure:

Assessing the situation

Working alongside key stakeholders in GLH, Atech hosted a series of workshops to scope out the project and create the migration strategy. To determine what the platform should look like, consideration was given to:

• The overall goals of the business.
• Simplifying and optimising the internal systems.
• Creating the flexibility and agility needed to allow the business to scale quickly. Maintaining the highest security standards to protect personal data.

Performing the migration

Atech undertook a number of tasks as part of the migration, which enabled it to consolidate and optimise the infrastructure. Requiring a secure, scalable and solid foundation, Azure was the obvious choice. Offering a reliable, consistent platform for performance-efficient cloud storage, Azure provides GLH with the tools to enable it’s digital transformation into smart hotels.
 

Results

Securing the platform

Using Azure Security Center, GLH has the assurance that its personal data remains protected, and the business compliant. A unified infrastructure security management system, strengthens GLH’s security posture and provides advanced threat protection across rapidly changing workloads and increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Managing expectations

Operating in two-week sprints, Atech kept the project on-track and mitigated any risks, while keeping the key stakeholders informed through a weekly Project Health Check Report. A review was held at the end of each sprint, providing the opportunity to address issues, highlight lessons learned, set the priorities for the next sprint and ensure the migration isn’t affecting business-as-usual.

Supporting the business

Through its managed services, Atech’s accredited cloud specialists offer 24×7 cloud support with guarantee resolution service level agreements (SLA) for the best level of response and resolution. This includes general maintenance such as, patching, backups, security and alerts as well as monitoring data usage to identify areas to optimise, together with financial reporting to help GLH keep on top of costs.
 

“Thanks to their impressive technical capabilities the team at Atech really know their stuff. Despite the complexity of the project, everything’s running smoothly and they’ve always been on hand, making us feel reassured every step of the way.” – Jairo Montes, Head of Infrastructure, GLH
 

A foundation for business transformation

Migrating from an aging, fragmented infrastructure to a secure Azure cloud platform, has allowed GLH to offer its customers the ‘smart’ hotel experience and maintain its leadership position.
 

Security features provided by the Azure cloud mean GLH remains compliant with legislation such as GDPR, and all data is protected against security breaches.
 

Atech’s team completed the migration without affecting business operations, and technical outages and high running costs have been replaced by a reliable service and first year running cost savings of 30%.
 

With savings of £800k anticipated over three years, the infrastructure replacement and migration project will pay for itself within months, and GLH continues to benefit from expert support and advice from Atech.
 

See how Atech can support you

Cloud migration is more than simply moving the infrastructure. The environment needs to be managed and optimised 24×7 to ensure it continues to add value to the business, while demonstrating compliance and security. This is all part of the Atech service.
 

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