Media agency saves £500,000 with cloud platform

Bezier has ditched its legacy systems and moved to a private cloud provided by Star

UK media agency Bezier has replaced its legacy IT set-up with a single private cloud, which it claims has resulted in cost savings of £500,000 a year.

The agency, whose clients include Warner Bros and Disney, teamed up with on-demand computing and communication services provider Star to roll out the cloud solution.

"Our business grew through mergers and acquisitions, meaning there was a fragmented infrastructure, with different email systems, office environments and hosting environments within the organisation," Chris Airey chief information officer at Bezier told Computing.

"So our goal was create the new company, rebranded as Bezier, and operate as a single business."

He added that the other objectives for the IT department were to create a virtual manufacturing environment in-house, a single client-facing solution and a virtual design agency, which could be accessed by staff across all its sites.

He explained that the decision to team up with Star was made because the services are all cloud based.

He also explained that the cost and business benefits have also been tangible.

"The efficiencies we've seen come from dealing with fewer suppliers, meaning I can consolidate the IT department's expenditure. Our different business units used to have different suppliers for things such as internet connectivity, LAN services and anti-virus. Once we had consolidated to one cloud and archiving solution, the costs fell dramatically."

The company has made power savings, and has been able to reduce its headcount as a result of the technology.

"We no longer need people looking after each of the different systems we use, or monitoring storage capacity as we have infinite capacity through cloud. I don't need senior IT people on each site anymore - just one or two across the organisation."

He added that he has redeployed some staff to other roles - but advised IT professionals that those who want to work in infrastructure should join services providers, rather than end users.

"People need to make a choice. If you want to work in infrastructure, then join a supplier. If you want to work at an end user - that requires more relationship management. The latter is much more of an app-centric role, there isn't much focus on infrastructure."