Client story Insight and Cromwell: Bringing people and information together

Facts at a glance

Client industry:

Property Management

Situation:

Cromwell Property Group (Cromwell) is a publicly-listed business with headquarters in Australia, and offices around the world. In 2015, they furthered their expansion by acquiring a pan-European commercial real estate platform. While this acquisition delivered many benefits, it did raise some sizeable technology challenges. Even though members of the new European workforce were already using Microsoft Office 365, the business now had disparate instances of each that required consolidation.

Solution:

• Consolidate the multi-tenant environment into one global tenant.
• Improve security and compliance by migrating to a single, easy to manage cloud environment.
• Amalgamate the business’ disparate Office 365 E3 licensing agreements.
• Align multiple licensing agreements under a single, global enterprise agreement.

Results:

• Licensing is now clear, consolidated and more cost-effective.
• Users are all on the latest technology and able to communicate, collaborate and work effectively regardless of when and where they are working.
• Utilisation of Microsoft Teams is increasing.
• Data is located on-shore as per compliance requirements.

Solution area:

Insight’s Connected Workforce solutions help clients connect their workforce with the technology needed to work smarter

Cromwell Property Group has operations across three continents, and a global investor base. As of 30 June 2020, they had a market capitalisation of $2.4 billion, a direct property investment portfolio in Australia valued at $3 billion, and total assets under management of $11.5 billion across Australia, New Zealand and Europe.

Situation

Cromwell Property Group (Cromwell) is a publicly-listed business with headquarters in Australia, and offices around the world. In 2015, they furthered their expansion by acquiring a pan-European commercial real estate platform.

While this acquisition delivered many benefits, it did raise some sizeable technology challenges. Even though members of the new European workforce were already using Microsoft Office 365, the business now had disparate instances of each that required consolidation, particularly from a licensing and services perspective. Cromwell had also inherited an on-premise mail environment which didn’t fit with their cloud-first business and IT strategy.

The acquisition also generated new security challenges associated with managing user identities across two separate markets, while simultaneously meeting the compliance requirements of both the Australian Privacy Act and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

After a few years operating with duplicate technology, Cromwell undertook a rigorous evaluation process before selecting Insight as the partner to help solve their immediate licensing challenges, and to establish a solid technology services foundation for future innovation.

“Cromwell is very much a cloud-first business. Following the acquisition, we engaged Insight to help us bring this new entity into our existing cloud environment, without disrupting our people’s ability to get their work done – wherever they may be.” Daniel Dickens, CTO, Cromwell Property Group

Solution

Insight worked very closely with the Cromwell team from the outset to understand its expectations and define the five key requirement goals for this project:

• Consolidate the multi-tenant environment into one global tenant.
• Improve security and compliance by migrating to a single, easy to manage cloud environment – with data hosted in either Australia or Europe to meet compliance requirements.
• Amalgamate the business’ disparate Office 365 E3 licensing agreements.
• Align multiple licensing agreements under a single, global enterprise agreement.
• Pave the way for new security measures, including robust, cloud-based identity management and multi-factor authentication.

Importantly, the entire migration process, as well as the roll-out of new security processes, needed to happen seamlessly, with minimal disruption to users. This was particularly relevant for those working in the European offices, so as to maintain continuity and efficiency across the consolidated organisation.

Insight therefore partnered with Insentra, a collaborative IT professional services partner, to deliver the migration and ensure Cromwell achieved the desired outcome.

“A key consideration with this project was to ensure we provided ‘business as usual’ for our employees, especially those in Europe who had just been through a corporate amalgamation,” said Daniel.

“We wanted to ensure that our people all had the tools and systems in place to do their jobs effectively and securely, while eradicating inefficiency in terms of how we managed everything from an IT perspective,” he added.

Results

Just a few months after the migration, the benefits are clear:

• Licensing is now clear, consolidated and more cost-effective.
  
• Users are all on the latest technology and able to communicate, collaborate and work effectively regardless of when and where they are working.
• Utilisation of Microsoft Teams is increasing.
• Data is located on-shore, in both Australian and European data centres respectively, as per compliance requirements.
• Extension of the centralised, cloud-based IT infrastructure, which offers an ideal foundation for agility and innovation.