Network Communications News (NCN) October 2017 | Page 22

PROJECT FOCUS
As strong as steel
Networking specialist, Riverbed has delivered a new level of agility for global
engineering consultancy, Hilson Moran, to improve efficiency and strengthen
the company’s data security via the company’s SteelFusion platform.
L
ee Beckford, head of IT,
Hilson Moran, explains,
“We need IT to deliver
the solutions that allow
our engineers to do their
job effectively. My priority is to
safeguard our data, to keep it safe
and to keep it accessible.
“We have a 10-year plan to
transform Hilson Moran’s approach
to IT. The plan is in three stages,
22 | October 2017
with the ultimate goal of moving
everything to the cloud. This
first step is to centralise our IT
infrastructure at the London office.
We want zero-branch IT.
“Centralisation allows us to
refresh hardware, address support
issues (particularly to remote
offices) and improve the back-up
and restoration of data. Qatar and
UAE, for instance, have a Sunday-
Thursday working week, so it is
essential that we can fix issues
from the UK on a Sunday. Also,
data back-ups were not being
done as rigorously as required.”
Lee adds, “For centralisation
to work, we needed maximum
efficiency from the Hilson Moran
network, in order to allow staff
to be highly mobile and to be
able to work from anywhere. We