“The work we do has a direct impact on people’s lives and so it’s absolutely essential that we are equipped to carry out our roles to the best of our ability. Daisy has helped us to do that.”
– Mark Horner, Project Manager at AstraZeneca
The Background
Most likely you’ve heard of AstraZeneca in recent years. They are a global pharmaceutical company that focuses on medical research to develop medicines that improve the health and quality of life of patients. They are well-known for their coronavirus vaccine, which was widely distributed throughout the UK to protect people against COVID-19.
Employing around 7,900 people in the UK, AstraZeneca’s UK operations take place across five main sites, in Cambridge, Luton, Merseyside and two sites in Cheshire.
The Challenge
In recent years, AstraZeneca made the strategic decision to switch their head office operations from one of their sites in Cheshire, to their Cambridge Discovery Centre.
As part of the move, they wanted to relocate the server hardware hosted in their Cheshire office to another site in Macclesfield. However, this equipment is responsible for AstraZeneca’s network across all of their UK sites so it was important to do this in such a way that they could avoid any interruption of service.
AstraZeneca’s telephony system is also integrated into this network, so any outages caused by the move would cause significant disruption to all lines of communication and data sharing. Before doing anything, they needed assurance that downtime would be minimal, and that they had robust software support, as well as server recovery and backup plans in place.
The Solution
We worked with the teams at AstraZeneca and BT’s onsite teams to do a full risk assessment relating to the move. This allowed us to identify any potential for disruption during the transition.
Ahead of the move, we made sure to mitigate the risk of downtime by providing a full server backup and recovery solution, ensuring they could get back online quickly in the event of an outage. We already provide their Mitel telephony solution for AstraZeneca, and identified that their software support agreement with the vendor was due for renewal, so we updated that, removing the risk of delays should support be required. This system supports around 1,900 employees and includes cordless phones that allow them to be more flexible, by taking calls on the go.
Our networking experts were able to optimise AstraZeneca’s LAN network by reconfiguring it as part of the move, ensuring that they did not need to invest in a whole new system, but instead could carry on as before, without changing their IP addresses.
The Result
The move was a great success, Mark Horner, Project Manager at AstraZeneca said: “The team at Daisy gave us the peace of mind we needed to initiate our office move. Their technical expertise and guidance was invaluable and I’m very pleased to consider them as an extension of our team.
“The work we do has a direct impact on people’s lives and so it’s absolutely essential that we are equipped to carry out our roles to the best of our ability. Daisy has helped us to do that.”
AstraZeneca achieved cost savings as part of this project, by leveraging their existing infrastructure, rather than investing in new elements. In fact, by reconfiguring their LAN network, we were able to make it even more secure than before as part of the process.
The Future
Building on our positive experiences of working together, we are currently exploring the potential to further improve upon AstraZeneca’s Mitel telephony system, by upgrading their interfaces with a new and improved platform, refreshing their devices and consolidating their 20,000+ end points into a single MX-ONE system, which will be compatible with their existing analogue, digital and cordless phones.
