The future’s in the cloud, and Intergen takes its email skywards

The story of Intergen and Cloud, before and after.

The concept of using the cloud to allow computing anywhere is no new thing. Businesses are rapidly catching on and starting to make the move. And that includes us.

Let’s use a few acronyms to tell the Intergen cloud story (because we know the IT world loves acronyms…)

IBC (Intergen Before Cloud)

Before its move to the cloud in late 2010, Intergen ran Microsoft Exchange purely on-premises for a staff of 240, with Exchange servers in each main office. These servers were virtual machines running on Hyper-V server hosts.

With an extremely busy Information Systems (IS) team, Intergen looked to Microsoft’s Online Services as a way of taking some of the load off its IT staff, freeing them up to focus on providing a first-rate service within the organisation.

With Exchange managed on-premise, the IS team had to manage the entire Exchange infrastructure, the VM platform and the threat management gateway. They were also responsible for backing up all data and the provision of secondary data protection. These were resource-intensive exercises which necessitated dedicated staff having Exchange knowledge and training.

By moving Intergen’s mailboxes online, time wasn’t the only resource being saved. With Exchange running entirely on-premise, 20GB of RAM and 700GB of storage were being consumed. In addition to reducing administrative maintenance and winning back staff time, Intergen has now regained the hardware it had allocated to running Exchange on-site and backing up 450GB of data.

TICV (The Intergen Cloud Vision)

“For Intergen the decision to move to the Cloud was a ‘no-brainer’,” says Tony Stewart, Intergen’s CEO. “As a Microsoft partner, we’re strongly committed to Microsoft technologies and directions, and the Cloud is a core part of this. For the Cloud, we’re all in – to borrow an expression from Steve Ballmer. We advocate Cloud solutions for our clients, and it made perfect sense for us to lead by example.”

“By moving Intergen’s email online, we’re not spread so thinly,” he continues. “We’ve been able to streamline our efforts and reduce the number of technologies our team needs to be skilled in. This means we can now afford to focus our attention on future business improvements and on being more responsive to the daily IT needs of Intergen’s staff.”

As a company in international growth mode, it also made sense to adopt a more internationally focused IT strategy, with an emphasis on high availability – business as usual from anywhere in the world and in any time zone.

IAC (Intergen After Cloud)

Intergen’s move to the cloud has meant less time spent managing systems; less maintenance and fewer support issues; more time to channel and use more productively elsewhere; not to mention getting back 700GB of disk space and 20GB of memory.

Support is available around the clock and already has proved useful, easy to use and responsive. The cloud also offers Intergen far greater agility and scalability. As Intergen grows, all we need to do is buy additional licences and Microsoft takes care of the rest.

Tony Stewart says, “We want what our customers want: IT systems that are just there, and that just work, without having to think too much about them. And now in hosting our emails online we have this luxury.”