Customer Success Story: Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS)

End-To-End Cloud Transformation

Background & Overview
The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) was founded in 1868. With locations in all major political and financial centres around the globe, it is the world’s leading professional body for qualifications and standards in land, property, infrastructure and construction.

Employing over 1,500 staff, with over 130,000 accredited professionals worldwide and a fiercely guarded reputation to uphold, RICS sets respected global standards to promote and enforce the development and management of property and construction to pioneer better places to live and work.

Project Requirements

As a globally recognised professional body, RICS’s work is hugely varied. To remain at the forefront of technology and innovation, RICS embarked on a major digital transformation project to ensure it continues to meet today’s and tomorrow’s technology demands, maintaining the highest confidence in the quality and ethics of the services provided.

To support and enable this significant transformation project, a Managed Services Provider was sought to help the institution transform its legacy infrastructure to a cloud-first digital environment, with ongoing infrastructure and application support to proactively monitor, manage and maintain the environment, 24x7x365.

Initiated through a formal tender process, CyberOne. Was selected as the preferred service provider amongst several other competitors. Selection criteria included:

1. Architect-led approach using an Azure Expert-level client engagement team
2. Proven track record in cloud transformation to multi-cloud environments
3. Achievable ROI approach vs existing infrastructure TCO
4. A customer-centric, flexible approach with the ability to tailor services to specific requirements.
5. Ability to service a global infrastructure, across multiple sites and geographic locations on a true 24x7 basis.

What Was Delivered – The Solution

CyberOne completely transformed the RICS Global infrastructure to a multi-cloud environment with Microsoft Azure as the primary cloud domain.

1. Architecture and design covering the complete environment, including business applications, website and customer applications
2. Security strategy replacement of legacy onsite solutions with a first security application stack
3. Cloud Transformation of all day-to-day business applications and infrastructure to an Azure cloud environment.
4. Azure optimisation continued improvement process post-implementation to optimise the estate and reduce cost
5. 24x7 Infrastructure Monitoring – Level-3 Infrastructure Monitoring of the environment.
6. 24x7 IT Helpdesk Service – to deliver an end-to-end ‘always on’ user experience for RICS personnel.

Benefits & Big Wins

With CyberOne’s Managed Services, the Cloud Transformation Programme is already benefiting RICS with a greater than 50% reduction in equivalent spend per annum—a significant yield.

Additional benefits include:

1. Improved end-to-end performance of networks, technology and equipment—Within one month, CyberOne had fully documented the RICS network and discovered several recommended improvements to redress the issues and improve uptime. CyberOne’s third-line team worked with RICS to provide a redesigned network to address the issues.
2. Move from reactive to proactive – Move from on-call engineering support (only responding to major incidents), to a true 24x7 ‘eyes on-screen’ proactive monitoring solution, enabling proactive incident remediation, long before it becomes an actual problem.
3. Overall reduction in downtime and service issues.
4. Cost reduction—Besides the 50% reduction in equivalent spend, ongoing estate optimisation ensures that the budget is controlled to allow further investment in future transformations.