The growing MSP with core strength in security extends its Nutanix service offering to meet customer needs
Formed in 1994, Cyberfort is a UK-based managed hosting, cybersecurity services and consulting provider with over 160 staff and a core specialisation in cybersecurity services and consulting. Founded by experts in security, cryptography and open source software, it has a distinctive and differentiated place in the UK datacentre and cloud marketplace as it uses decommissioned military bunkers for its datacentres. These bomb-proof facilities are located outside the high-risk zone in the London area but still within easy reach of the capital. With headquarters in Thatcham, Berkshire, the company is successfully helping customers with day-to-day Cloud, Data Centre and Security managed service operations across the private and public sectors.
As part of this, the company was asked by a key customer, an accountancy software service provider, to help them progress from an ageing platform to a more secure, scalable, reliable and high-performing infrastructure.
A true partnership
Cyberfort can stretch its resources on demand by accessing Nutanix engineers and consultants for help and guidance as part of its strong partner ecosystem.
A chance to innovate in the private cloud
By increasing Nutanix skills and knowledge, Cyberfort has a powerful hyper-converged architecture solution to offer customers seeking a future in private clouds but with the freedom to switch to other architectures if needed.
A secure and infinitely flexible solution
With Nutanix, Cyberfort has been able to deliver the customer with a reliable, adaptive and fast service for their end-users, supplementing Cyberfort networking and backup capabilities with native Nutanix platform and security features, as well as integrations with third-party software and hardware.
A lot of our capability relies on partnerships with vendors like Nutanix, and those partnerships need to be built on human relationships. Having access to technical individuals proves invaluable because they’re an extension of our team.
The customer wanted to innovate, upgrade and enhance its existing platform that provided accountancy services to approximately 1,500 customers with a total 6,000 end users. The customer priority was to operate from an environment offering security, resilience and scalability.
“We had a customer using our colocation and backup services who were limited by platform scalability and wanted us to take more management of the infrastructure,” recalled Rob Arnold, Cyberfort Chief Digital Officer.
“The legacy environment required a refresh, ensuring a reliable and secure by design platform. They needed to invest and looked to us as a trusted managed cloud partner to help them.”
There was a clear need to overhaul the existing virtualisation system in favour of a replacement that was reliable, able to meet future growth needs and was simple to control.
Familiar names such as VMware had high costs attached to them and Cyberfort felt the need to explore alternative avenues. Cyberfort’s technology vendor, Fujitsu, recommended Nutanix as a potential solution for this use case.
“Nutanix has the capability and feature set needed for this solution and our engagement with the pre-sales and engineering teams is always superb to support right-sizing of the platform” said Nicole Reader, Cloud Solutions Architect at Cyberfort.
Cyberfort elected to deploy Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), together with its AHV virtualisation hypervisor software. Nutanix Flow for network microsegmentation was also deployed to create a rich, secure and highly manageable infrastructure.
“From a support and management point of view, the solution deployment has been smooth as Nutanix is an intuitive solution. It took under 10 days to rack and stack the new Hyper Converged server hardware and build and configure the new platform.”
“Although we are well-acquainted with the capabilities of Nutanix AHV Hypervisor, especially given its foundation on familiar open-source software,” Arnold said. “Our team seamlessly adapted to the environment, thanks to the strong collaboration with Nutanix. The clarity and guidance provided by their pre-sales engineering team were particularly valuable; their honest, pragmatic advice, like highlighting when certain approaches weren’t the most suitable, was instrumental in ensuring our success.”
“We’ve done countless re-platforming projects for our customers, and this was one of the biggest, so there was a source of anticipation as to how it was going to go,” Arnold said. “But there has been little impact for users, most of whom didn’t even notice the change. 1500+ VMs were migrated over a period of 8 weekends, with 99% of these completed using the integrated Nutanix Move tool. One end user identified the platform changes, but only due to their improved performance.”
Cyberfort and its customer have realised considerable operational efficiencies, systems management has been simplified and “day 2” operations (that is, everything needed to secure and maintain services on an ongoing basis) have also been ramped up.
Cyberfort’s Arnold and Reader view opportunities for growth in private cloud offerings in support of their customers ambitions, and are considering further investments in Nutanix via products such as Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) for multi-cloud oversight.
Arnold said:
“We’re looking at evolving our private cloud solutions and I really want to utilise this experience to demonstrate how we can manage customer migration to a new feature rich, performant and reliable secure private clouds’ That’s especially interesting for customers yet to be impacted by the Broadcom deal to buy VMware.
“Nutanix will be a front runner in our private cloud capability. We know how people will benefit from Nutanix and it’s a simplified model with not a lot of bespoke service needed. We’ve grown our capabilities on another technology stack and matured our private cloud platform. It’s a really big win and we’re keen to celebrate that.”
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