Azure Adoption for Stiles Harold Williams

About Stiles Harold Williams

Stiles Harold Williams is a firm of national independent property advisors, well-known in the market for expertise in commercial, residential and mixed-use property. Originally formed in 1798, Stiles Harold Williams has grown to nine offices, and almost 200 staff, managing over 1,000 properties throughout the UK.

The challenge

With a pressing need to upgrade their digital estate, Stiles Harold Williams partnered with Transparity to embark on a cloud adoption journey. The primary goals were to reduce the on-premises footprint, retire existing servers and ensure a scalable, secure, and flexible IT environment in the cloud that could support future business needs and innovation.

The solution

As a principle, Transparity follows the guidance set out within Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework. This framework encourages the consideration of several topics over various stages to ensure that standards are aligned with industry-recognised best practices. This project focused on Plan, Ready and Adopt.

Phase 1: Planning

Key actions in the planning phase included:

• Understanding the digital estate and its components. Rationalisation was done across 40+ servers. A large number were to be decommissioned, some were to be replaced and finally, some were to be rehosted in Azure. For these, migration groups and waves were determined.
• Creating organisational alignment, aligning the new operating model, responsibilities and ownership. With this, responsibilities were aligned between Transparity and the SHW IT team.
• Defining skills readiness – here a lack of internal Azure skills was found and Transparity provided the route for upskilling, recommending courses and exams for each of the relevant team members.
• Establishing a cloud adoption plan aligned with business outcomes. This pulled together all of the information from the previous steps and then added timelines for the migration waves, in this case, pilot and production waves.

Phase 2: Cloud Foundation & Landing Zone Deployment

Building upon the meticulous planning phase, the next step was to establish a robust cloud foundation and deploy a comprehensive landing zone. This phase was critical in laying the groundwork for a seamless and secure cloud transition, steps included:

• Validated project requirements and gathered technical requirements.
• Designed and deployed core Azure resources, including Azure Policy Controls, Security Controls, and a Secure Networking Topology.
• Configured logging, monitoring, and auditing mechanisms to ensure visibility and compliance.

Phase 3: Workload Migration

With the Azure Cloud Foundation and Landing Zone now fully in place, the cloud migration itself was next. First a pilot wave, then a production wave with a lift and shift migration of the servers into Azure followed by user testing and file migration to Azure Files.

The outcome

The Azure adoption project delivered significant benefits for Stiles Harold Williams, including:

• Cost savings: A reduction of 18 servers being managed by a third party to just 3 now in Azure, plus savings from the removal of VMware licences, server maintenance and support.
• Enhanced Infrastructure: The migration to Azure provided a simplified network and a modern, scalable, secure and flexible IT environment.
• Future-Ready: The new Azure environment means Stiles Harold Williams is more agile and able to adapt as required for future technological advancements and innovations.

The collaboration between Stiles Harold Williams and Transparity exemplifies the effectiveness of a structured approach to cloud adoption. By leveraging the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure, the project successfully modernised the organisation’s digital estate, ensuring readiness for future challenges and opportunities.