Enabling a Multi-National Engineering Firm With Over 30 Years’ Experience to Develop a ‘Cloud-First’ Strategy

The sprawling nature of Keating Construction’s operation placed strain on the overall IT platform. This platform had been built up over time to a point where most of its on-site systems were coming to the end of their product lifecycle. As the company continued to grow internationally, there was an increased need for an IT transformation. Rapid growth combined with multiple locations across fixed, short term and in remote sites meant traditional approaches to IT no longer provided the agility and flexibility that the business needed. This combined with international expansion demanded a new way of thinking on how to deliver IT services.

On top of this, in 2018 Keating Construction was acquired by Dublin-based CBD Capital. For any company, two key drivers for undertaking cloud migration include critical business events such as mergers or acquisitions and a need to create a more elastic work environment. With a clear motivation, Keating Construction responded by carrying out a risk register to identify all potential risks the company was facing. Vincent Nolan is Keating Construction’s IT Transformation Co-Ordinator and he identified several challenges.

According to Vincent “Mission critical infrastructure was coming close to breaking point, this combined with outdated communication tools and disaster recovery setup required a re-pouring of our foundations to create a successful platform for future growth.”

Keating Construction’s risk register pointed to a need to design and implement a robust, reliable, secure, and scalable infrastructure to service both office and site locations. The firm’s vision was to develop an IT transformation programme which follows a “cloud-first” strategy. As Keating Construction ’s trusted partner ActionPoint was tasked with working hand in hand with their team to deliver this vision. As Vincent Nolan pointed out the “team at Keating Construction had the vision, ActionPoint had the expertise.”

At ActionPoint, we have extensive experience in helping organisations to transition from physical data centres to the Azure Cloud. With all cloud migration projects, we follow a simple yet robust process which includes identifying key motivators and desired business outcomes, developing a cloud adoption strategy, analysing the organisation’s Azure readiness and finally migrate the workloads and applications to Azure. Keating’s risk register identified key motivations, following this, ActionPoint again used this to establish critical next steps and detail a specific implementation plan. The team prioritised high impact projects such as Office365 and leveraging the Azure cloud for disaster recovery and backup followed on by enabling key line of business applications to run on Azure. Our Managed Cloud services now fully monitor, manage and continue to enhance Keating Construction’s Cloud Platform.

Having begun its journey in the 1980s, Keating Construction has grown rapidly to become an internationally trading, multi-location operation. It is a testament to their ambition and willingness to improve that they firstly identified the need to carry out a risk register and, secondly, that they established a vision of a cloud-first IT strategy. The challenges unearthed in the register were a natural progression of this growth.

The decision to choose ‘Managed Cloud’, ActionPoint’s cloud migration service, has made Keating Construction a more scalable, resilient and secure organisation. Cloud-based backups ensure that Keating Construction’s business is always online and the firm has been granted incredible peace of mind in knowing disaster recovery plan is in place. Storage barriers have been completely removed and provisioning infrastructure securely and quickly for new applications is a breeze. This project has also opened up new avenues for innovation within the cloud with a number of key projects already coming down the line. In 2019, Keating Construction now has the infrastructure in place to continue to scale, grow and innovate for years to come.

“When we decided on becoming “Cloud-First”, we knew we needed a partner with the expertise to take us on this journey. ActionPoint are that partner, from the initial consultation to the planning, migration and now management of our cloud estate, their professionalism, service and technical expertise means that we can now look forward to the future.”