15 November 2013

Evans Cycles has 50 stores across the UK and also sells via the internet. In 2011, its IT team was tasked with finding a suitable replacement for a PBX that was no longer meeting the company’s growing needs. At the same time, the team was asked to make savings, and this prompted it to approach InTechnology to discuss hosted telephony options.

Working with the Harrogate-based managed service provider, Evans discovered that its legacy telephony estate was effectively being mismanaged by a third party, with evidence of significant over-charging. It also had a tape-based backup system that was not always 100 per cent reliable and consumed admin resources, with single file restores often taking hours to complete.

Furthermore, the firm’s growing data estate of more than 2TB was adding to the pressure on the backup system, while a lack of redundancy within the IT environment was at odds with the company’s desire to have enterprisegrade DR and business continuity.

InTechnology’s solution was to first move Evans onto its online managed backup service. It says this not only accelerated the speed of restores but also added an extra layer of DR-oriented data security. The company claims that average backup windows have now been slashed from four hours to fifteen minutes, while reliability and security have also been transformed with data backed up across multiple data centres with any failures identified and alerted.

The migration of the backup system was followed by a two stage telephony project: the moving of Evans’ Gatwickbased head office onto InTechnology’s hosted telephony platform, and the signing over of its entire calls and lines estate.

Overall, Evans Cycles is confident of securing a 20 per cent reduction in IT costs through its adoption of managed services: the automation and proactive monitoring of the backup system has streamlined the whole process, stripping out cost and freeing the system administrator from low value tasks; while the fully managed provisioning of new telephony sites has removed a further burden from the internal team.
InTechnology adds that the ability to tap into an end-to-end portfolio and bring on line new systems quickly and cost-efficiently is helping Evans shape its broader IT strategy. For example, it has recently moved its web proxy servers onto an InTechnology managed IaaS platform.