As we transition to become a more digitally integrated business, it is vital that we have a futureproof IT infrastructure. Microsoft Azure provides us with the flexibility, scalability and resiliency we need in order to deliver a great IT experience to our employees and customers. This has been a true digital transformation, and the support provided by Daisy throughout the process has been invaluable.
David Smith, Head of IT, JCB Finance
The Background
JCB Finance is one of the UK’s leading asset finance companies. With 50 years’ experience in providing asset finance for customers in the construction, agricultural and industrial sectors, JCB Finance offers fast and flexible finance solutions. Its offerings help companies preserve their working capital whist spreading the outlay on new assets in a cost-effective and tax efficient manner.
With a national field force, supported by a direct sales team at its head office in Rocester, Staffordshire, JCB Finance aims to provide JCB customers with access to state-of-the art finance options anywhere in the UK. Central to this approach is high-speed, efficiency and fairness, making JCB Finance a valued sales-aid partner to JCB and its dealers.
With an increasingly digital footprint, JCB’s customers are changing their buying habits – wanting to apply and manage their finance applications online and in real-time. This has required JCB to change a core element of its business model and become an integral part of the online JCB sales process, with customers being offered finance during their web transaction.
The challenge
JCB Finance customers previously had access to a 24/7 portal to view historical account information such as their current agreements and scheduled payments. However, the portal was limited to historical activities. To generate new agreements, customers needed to contact their dedicated relationship manager who would begin the paperwork before passing it back to JCB Finance to complete the process.
JCB Finance operated its own data centres, however this didn’t offer the scalability or resiliency required to support this new 24/7 business model. In addition, JCB Finance’s IT department was already spending a significant amount of time maintaining and patching its existing IT infrastructure.
As a result, JCB Finance made the decision to move its entire IT infrastructure and supporting applications to the public cloud. This would provide JCB Finance with a more dynamic and futureproof infrastructure, which would be responsive to any changes in the company’s strategic direction. By working with a managed services provider, JCB Finance was also aiming to reduce the time its internal IT team was spending “keeping the lights on” – allowing the team to focus on delivering new solutions to meet business needs.
The Solution
After evaluating its requirements, JCB Finance selected Daisy as its partner of choice due to its extensive experience in cloud, data centres and networking. Acting as JCB Finance’s Cloud Services Partner, Daisy helped transform the company’s existing IT infrastructure and applications to make them cloud ready. Then over a 12-month period, services were migrated away from JCB Finance’s old legacy infrastructure onto Microsoft Azure.
As part of the migration, Daisy worked closely with JCB Finance to test all disaster recovery plans, including ensuring that all previous bottlenecks and single points of failure were removed from the newly designed infrastructure. Daisy also helped to ensure that JCB Finance’s security posture was correct, which included the provision of a managed firewall service.
The Result
JCB Finance now has an evergreen and modern solution, with no legacy products being utilised within the business. In addition to supporting JCB Finance’s new online business model, the new IT backbone has also supported its move to remote working by improving the performance of applications being accessed by iPad users.
By moving to the public cloud, JCB Finance can now right-size server capacity in line with demand, something that simply wasn’t possible before. JCB Finance has also benefited from increased security as a result of moving to a SaaS and PaaS model. There are no longer delays in patching systems, and the internal team now spends significantly less time managing the new infrastructure, with Daisy on hand to provider third-line support if and when required.
