Lancer Scott Case Study

Lancer Scott are a major privately-owned built environment construction, development, and property maintenance company in the UK. They started out in 1996 and have since developed in a structured manor, ensuring they maintain the foundations that have underpinned the organisation since inception.

Their vision is to be the most trusted partner in the built environment, leaving a positive legacy for the communities in which they work and live.

Lancer Scott have over 200 employees, making them one of our largest accounts to date. We are particularly proud to work with them, due to their core values; Honesty, Pursuit of Excellence, Corporate Responsibility, Diversity and Inclusion, Teamwork and Care for the Community.

The Challenge:

From initial conversations with Lancer Scott, we identified that they needed a full review of their current IT estate so we could provide a better understanding on how we could support their business. We engaged in a period of Infrastructure assessment to get a full picture of the way the company was operating and identified key areas that needed improvement.

The main challenges for Lancer Scott were:

• IT Infrastructure needed modernising and upgrading
• Escalated IT support required to support in house IT manager
• Full backup solution required updating to increase protection, security and business continuity

The existing VPN solution in place at Lancer Scott was not able to accommodate more than 10 users, which was creating increased issues within their offices.

Their VM hosts were out of date and nearing capacity, which meant they were unable to cope with the current load, with no space for the company to grow.

Lancer Scott had a limited back-up retention period which was putting them at potential risk of losing data and their firewall was incapable of utilising the leased line capability.

The LAN had just a single subnet and Wi-Fi was pre-shared key password protection for both Corporate and Guest access, making them an easy target for cyberattacks.

Due to the growth of their business, particularly over the past 5 years, it became clear that Lancer Scott had outgrown their legacy infrastructure.

The Solution:

Once we had a full understanding of the issues Lancer Scott were facing, we put together a strategic roadmap in collaboration with their IT Manager and Commercial Manager, so we were clear on how OTS were going to support the business to ensure they could continue to grow.

Firstly, we installed a new 10Gb, layer 3 network, which included enterprise-grade HA firewalls, switches, and access points. This allowed for a multi-VLAN network to be built and traffic to be segregated properly. For end users, this meant a smoother and more reliable VPN solution whilst maintaining Single Sign On (SSO). This was also put in place to accommodate employees transitioning across different floors within their existing building.

In order to upgrade their IT infrastructure, we installed a new multi-host Hyper-V cluster & SAN, and migrated services to new up to date VM’s to provide an automated multi-redundancy failover solution.

Finally, to ensure additional protection, we set up a separate multi-disk NAS system in a different location to their main servers, with encrypted backups running to both this and an offsite cloud storage facility. Separate to the backup solution, continuous replication is run between the hosts in the event of a VM host or disk array failure.

Outcomes:

• Modern infrastructure implemented
• Capacity for future scalable business growth
• Cost savings
• Business security and continuity in the cloud, off-site and on-premise

Here’s what Will Hammond, Commercial Director at Lancer Scott, had to say about working with Office Tech Suite:

“OTS have provided Lancer Scott with a seamless upgrade of our IT estate. They helped us identify the need for enhanced technology across the business as we continue to grow, and were able to recognise the key areas for improvements across the board”

We are excited to see Lancer Scott continue to evolve and are grateful to be on the journey with them!

For more information on how we can support your business with transformative technology solutions, please get in touch today.