02 November 2017

Founded nearly 30 years ago, MMRIT provides IT services to professional services organisations in London, including hedge funds, alternative investment managers, barristers’ chambers and law firms.

The company is based in Clerkenwell, near Old Street tube station and the British Museum. It reports that an increasing number of its clients were keen to move their IT off-premise to the cloud. The advantage would be the ability to centralise their infrastructure, free up office space and share costs around hardware, power and cooling with other MMRIT customers.

However, customers were reluctant to move fully to the public cloud so MMRIT and Iomart began work to design and build a secure, private cloud environment which would meet the security and regulatory requirements of its clients. MMRIT was already using Iomart’s colocation services in London.

Paul Line, head of commercial for MMRIT, says: “Our clients are comfortable with MMRIT because of their experience with us, our expertise and our security accreditations. However, they needed reassurance when taking the step from on-premise to private cloud. Working with Iomart, which has similar expertise and security accreditations, as well as a public listing on the stock market, we were able to assure our clients that they could trust us with their data and they were happy to give us control to create the best cloud solution.” 

Iomart says it worked with the MMRIT team to build a highly available, private cloud platform that meets all the financial and security requirements of their customers. Instances are securely and logically separated to protect each client’s data. There is no single point of failure.

It is housed in Iomart’s London data centre which, says Iomart, allows the MMRIT team controlled access to the infrastructure so they can make their own changes on behalf of customers when necessary. It says MMRIT’s clients benefit from more robust power and connectivity than when their infrastructure was hosted on their own premises.

Iomart says that while the primary production servers are in London, disaster recovery is provided from another of its data centres in Maidenhead. Fast connectivity between the two sites, it says, gives clients the security of having a DR location that is outside the M25. Regular business continuity and DR testing is carried out.

Iomart says the private cloud environment meets the requirement of the Financial Conduct Authority and the Solicitors Regulatory Authority which means MMRIT can be confident when targeting new clients in these highly regulated sectors.

Previously MMRIT had used a number of different managed service providers but Iomart is now its sole provider.