A security-conscious company
SMI is a specialist SME delivering mission critical connectivity in the most demanding environments.
Their cable systems form the central nervous systems of critical infrastructure operating in hostile environments, including naval ships, submarines, aircraft, subsea power generation and transport.
They are an accredited supplier to the Ministry of Defence and are the only company to have 30 years of continuous Capability Approval certification from the MoD.
IT security and compliance are of paramount importance to SMI, not least because government contracts require certain standards to be met as a prerequisite. But technology moves so fast that it can be challenging to keep up with the pace of change.
Without a full-time internal IT department, SMI needed a reliable IT partner they could trust to help them get – and stay – on top of IT security and compliance, in the most seamless way possible.
Duncan Rodgers, ERP and Projects Specialist at SMI, acted as the point of contact with HBTech, the external IT partner that SMI tasked with improving their IT infrastructure SMI needed to bring their systems up to date and make sure they were where they needed to be – at the high level their products and clients deserve.
Bringing things up to date
With security paramount due to the industry they operate in, SMI knew they needed to upgrade their IT systems to stay on top.
Duncan Rodgers explained, “The catalyst was basically the pace of change within the world. The challenge for older companies like ours is bringing the company up to date with technologies – not only hardware, also software, security and infrastructure. Technology is moving so fast that the challenge is trying to keep pace.”
“We are mandated by government departments on what we can and cannot do. We got the go ahead to make sure we had everything that we needed on the cloud, so we moved from a locally hosted server to a full cloud solution”
“The main objective was to future-proof the IT structure of the company. We needed to improve IT security, hardware reliability, scalability and the level of support. The final objective of moving into the cloud was to ensure the stability of third party software we use within our ERP system.”
A smooth transition
To implement the upgrades, SMI engaged HBTech at a project level. SMI appreciated HBTech’s tailored approach focussed on SMI’s need and business “HBTech operate a very personal service”.
Duncan Rodgers knew that he needed to make the whole process as seamless as possible for the staff at SMI, “My personal objective was for the process to appear seamless and minimise the impact on the users. As far as I’m concerned in IT, if people don’t know it’s happening, then you’ve done your job right.”
To ensure a smooth transition, Duncan Rodgers arranged for HBTech to undertake as many project activities as possible offline or out of hours. This meant that any disruption to staff and the business was minimised.
According to Duncan Rodgers, “Downtime was minimal. It was a couple of hours, and that was a lot to do with the offline work that was done to make sure that the impact to our business was absolutely minimal. Everybody was ready to not be able to operate for the best part of a day. And it ended up being just a couple of hours,” Disruption was so limited that when he announced that it was all done, people could hardly believe it, “One staff member asked ‘What was all the fuss about?’ That meant we’d done our job properly.”
Upgrades across the board
Moving from a locally hosted server to an Azure-based cloud hosted system brought wide-ranging benefits. Along with enhanced security, compliance improvements and greater reliability and performance, there are cost efficiencies and operational efficiencies. SMI now benefit from increased flexibility and agility when changes are required and moving to the cloud has allowed for more innovation and integration.
“All of our objectives in moving to the cloud have been met and we’re already seeing the benefits now. It was all about future proofing and improvement everywhere, security, reliability, scalability and support. And it’s working.”
“Business continuity was factored into what we are doing. We’re very focused on disaster recovery and business continuity because of the type of work we do. A lot of it can be done remotely now and from an IT perspective we’d be up and running within a couple of hours. And in some areas, it wouldn’t even go down.”
Staying ahead
Staying up to date with changes in IT security is challenging, but essential to a business like SMI’s.
Duncan Rodgers explains “There’s been a massive change in the way the government look at cyber security and their own IT infrastructure. So we’ve made changes. Some of our restrictions were mandated and some of our restrictions were internal. You can’t be left behind and have competitors get ahead of you.”
“When we’ve got a challenge, HBTech take the time to explain what that challenge is so we understand it so we can help mitigate the challenge at hand.”
The upgrades quickly paid off – SMI found that they already met government requirements for IT security and compliance because of the improvements they had undertaken.
“The coming year is looking really, really good as far as what we’ve got coming up and what changes we need to make. At the tail end of last year, we were given some more information from the government regarding IT security and compliance. And when we went through it, we found out that we were extremely high in the scoring zone with work that’s already done. And that was down to the advice from HBTech and the guidance they gave us. They did it on time and on budget. They gave us all the support we needed and more.”
Being on top of their IT systems means that SMI can be proactive about improvements instead of having to rush to react to required changes.
Duncan Rodgers considers that, “We don’t need to make knee-jerk reactions. We’re now in a position where we can understand what’s coming through and engage very quickly with HBTech on it if there are any changes needed. Everything’s sped up. Now we have the pace and agility within IT to be able to change if we need to. We’re more agile, more adaptable and we have a lot more knowledge so we can make informed decisions. We’re ahead of the curve now.”
A trusted partner
With HBTech as their trusted partner, SMI know their IT systems are well looked after “It’ll be a phone call, and then we can worry about other things, that’s how we’ve got it set up at the moment and that’s down to what we’ve got in place with HBTech. They are unbelievably helpful. They are so professional in what they do. And I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them in a heartbeat to anybody else because they always go the extra mile.”
“It’s not a scary world anymore, and our trust in and engagement with HBTech is key.”
If you need a trusted partner to help you stay ahead of IT changes contact us.
