SECOM is one of the world’s leading electronic security companies, operating in 13 countries with a 49,000 strong workforce. SECOM Plc.’s roots are in Japan, where they develop their distinctive service-orientated approach to state-of-the-art security.
SECOM were suffering from an unreliable legacy email system, stretched IT resources, and a lack of effective companywide collaboration. As with most global organisations, a secure and resilient email infrastructure is core to SECOM’s business operations. Their legacy system was providing a sub standard email service with latency and management issues. SECOM’s challenge was to deliver a secure, resilient and reliable email infrastructure for their UK users, incorporating email archiving for compliance, enterprise level security, and future proofing scalability.
Bryan Webster (IT Manager at SECOM) assessed and reviewed all mature offerings available to fulfill their requirements. Having looked into traditional on-premise offerings, including Microsoft Exchange, SECOM made the conscious business decision to move forward with a cloud solution. They reached this conclusion having recognized that the cloud approach would provide them with unparalleled levels of resilience, security and a wider platform to integrate additional cloud applications into the company. Core project drivers included:
• The need for efficient email delivery assurances, and Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) for email infrastructure availability.
• The need for greater collaboration within the workforce ensuring retained market leadership.
To add to these core requirements, SECOM was required to archive historical emails for compliance reasons, and required a simple and intuitive solution to cater for this. As Bryan states, “We needed a whole product solution to deliver for us. Minimal disruption to end users delivering the solution was a prerequisite.”
Having made the decision to move to the cloud for their messaging and collaboration service delivery, SECOM had several options available for consideration. In a short time period, they quickly established Google Apps for Work as the market leader, with unmatched product maturity derived from years of development, experience and engineering focus.
SECOM needed a trusted global partner to work with them to configure, deploy and support the service. AppsCare, Google for Work Premier Partner was the natural partner of choice, having an established portfolio and proven experience in cloud solutions delivery, project management and support. SECOM were under initial time pressures to kick off the project and set up the back end infrastructure. Bryan points out, “Due to imminent incumbent service contract renewals, we were forced to migrate our users onto the email security and archiving platform delivered with Google Apps, in a very short time period.”
AppsCare, whose technical deployment teams are well versed in delivering project milestones under time pressure, worked shoulder to shoulder with Bryan and his team, delivering the first element of the project over a single weekend. The project went ahead successfully, and by Monday morning their employees
were using the new system, benefitting from upgraded email security and compliance, with limitless email archiving in the cloud.
The support during the rollout was excellent. AppsCare built the back end configuration for our users across the weekend, in order to go live on Monday morning. They continue to support us with the service.
Moving forward, the organisation has taken a mature, structured and phased approach to rolling out Google Apps to their user base. The initial focus has been email migration and shared calendars, followed by document collaboration and additional Google Apps functionality.
Results from the complete rollout were both dramatic and swift. AppsCare’s deployment specialists have worked with SECOM, delivering enterprise email infrastructure and collaborative tools, which have provided zero downtime throughout the deployment, and entire service delivery. Complaints about delivery latency have disappeared, and the IT team can now focus on integrating additional Google Apps functionality, to keep the company at the forefront of technology, and ahead of the competition.
The solution has checked all boxes for email infrastructure, security, compliance, and collaboration and archiving needs. Taking a structured deployment approach has ensured a smooth change management process with minimal impact on end users. Bryan states, “We look forward to additional developments with Google and AppsCare, and definitely see Google Apps, and cloud computing as the future for the enterprise.”