Shepherds Friendly has partnered with leading cloud and digital services provider, ANS to completely migrate to Microsoft Azure public cloud to build operational resilience and the foundations to enable them to optimise and innovate using advanced cloud services in the future.

As a thriving financial mutual business, which has been operating for almost 200 years, based in Cheadle, Cheshire, the organisation prides itself on making meaningful commitments to its members through innovation. For over 10 years, ANS has supported Shepherds Friendly and their 100 staff, as they embark on their cloud journey from on premises solutions, to hybrid cloud and now to Azure public cloud, including, but not limited to the re-host of Windows servers and SQL server workloads.

Migrating to Azure means the organisation is keeping ahead of the competition by building operation resiliency, something companies in the finance sector are keen to achieve swiftly. The organisation can plan for the future knowing it has solid architecture in place, capable of supporting its teams and members through any kind of business continuity incident.

Realising the power and scalability of what Azure can offer is just the start with the IT team already looking at more advanced Azure services, which they can leverage faster than ever before. Combined with the elasticity provided by Azure, the strategic move will allow for Shepherds Friendly to forecast cost savings across the company. As a modern day mutual owned by its members, this means customers can rest assured every pound is being spent in their best interest whilst services are improved.

As a result of Azure migration, the organisation can now begin to automate business processes.

Shepherds Friendly Operations Director, Sam Chivers said, “The ANS team made it their mission to understand our business requirements and where this move could add value going forward. The level of investment from ANS has been excellent. It’s reassuring knowing you’re working with a strong partner and it made ANS the obvious choice when we made the decision to fully move to cloud.”

Ben Austen, Head of IT and Software at Shepherds Friendly added: “We were aware of the benefits moving to Azure could bring to our software development team and it was helpful to lean on ANS’ expertise. Right from the first engagement, we knew we were working a trusted Microsoft certified partner that could provide us with the insight and management we were looking for.”

ANS Technical Director Joe Wolski commented: “It has been a pleasure to work with Shepherds Friendly over the last 10 years and we look forward to continuing to strengthen our relationship with them as they lay the foundations for the next step in their cloud journey which will be the key to the business’s success moving forward.”