How one IT chief shifted the needle on a reactive IT strategy

Looking at the latest and greatest tech being showcased across the IT sector, it is easy to forget that most companies are not purchasing software and hardware because they want to, with IT systems being fundamental to the efficiency operations of every business.

But not all IT leaders are fortunate enough to work in organisations where IT is afforded a top priority, which can lead to more reactive IT security measures and under-investment in technology infrastructure. Logistics firm Norsk Global, which is headquartered in Heathrow, previously took a reactive approach to cyber security and under-prioritised IT infrastructure investment.

Norsk Global’s chief technology officer (CTO), Nick Andrews, explains: “Norsk Global is obviously a logistics company. When I arrived, we weren’t really keeping on top of IT.”

This meant that managing software and hardware assets was less than ideal and the reactive approach to cyber security directly affected the logistics firm’s ability to run its business operations.

“The infrastructure that I inherited was just about managing. Radical changes were desperately needed to not only keep pace with growing customer demand, but for Norsk to innovate and diversify our services further. We also needed to improve resiliency and find a way of keeping escalating operational costs within budget,” adds Andrews.

As an example, he says the company experienced a serious outage preventing its customers from using the applications programming interfaces (API) it provides to book shipments with major carriers: “The philosophy was, well, it works…I can see the lights are flashing, so we’re good. It’s like the old server in the corner. If it works then everything’s OK, but we had an issue where we lost a node and we were hampered because customers couldn’t book shipments. It was a real pinch point.”

His first major task was to fix the IT foundation because everything was running on eight-year-old traditional VMware nodes and there was a need to purchase more VMware licenses.

The company also ran older hardware, which needed replacing. However, Andrews found that the cost of the additional VMware licences it needed was “astronomically expensive”. So instead of buying more VMware licences, Andrews said the company selected Nutanix AHV, leading to savings of approximately £150,000 to £160,000. This cost saving was achieved by avoiding the need to purchase the additional VMware licenses that would have been required.

Andrews describes the migration to Nutanix AHV as seamless and straightforward, with minimal issues. This successful implementation has provided a strong foundation for the company’s IT infrastructure. “I can’t stress how easy and straightforward it was to migrate our existing VMs from VMware over to the Nutanix environment,” he says.

The company initially began with a three-node Nutanix Enterprise Cloud installed in its Heathrow Airport datacentre, which eventually replaced 13-legacy servers and associated storage. The final step was to migrate all existing virtual workloads from VMware to the Nutanix AHV hypervisor. At the same time, Norsk also opted to switch from storing business-critical backups in the Microsoft Azure Cloud to using a remote Enterprise Cloud cluster for this purpose.

It has also deployed backup technology from Hycu, which adds data protection and resiliency to its Nutanix IT environment. This helped Norsk Global to restore systems after it experienced a security incident a few years ago, as Andrews explains: “One of the key benefits of Hycu backup is that it encrypts all your backups and they remain protected, which means we were able to recover from that incident. If we had stored our backups openly on the network, we’d have been compromised.”

He says Hycu’s latest product offering now guarantees immutable backups, which further enhances data security. The company has recently transitioned from traditional antivirus to more advanced security measures, which includes endpoint detection and response (EDR), managed detection and response (MDR), and network detection and response (NDR).

Andrews says these upgrades offer full coverage of the network and environment, ensuring robust monitoring and threat detection, adding: “We’ve gone from traditional signature-based antivirus to an EPDR, MDR, and NDR. This means we now have all aspects of the network and IT environment.”

The support from Nutanix is also proactive, improving the resiliency of the business. Andrews says the environment experienced an issue with a faulty node. Not only did the virtual machine environment fail-over to a working node, but, as Andrews recalls, Nutanix identified that the faulty node was due to a problem with its memory chips.

“Nutanix switched it over and put it onto the other nodes, and we were still up running. No one knew anything had gone wrong,” he adds.

In fact, having detected the hardware issue, Nutanix pre-emptively ordered replacement memory chips, which were shipped overnight, ensuring  the system remained operational without disruption.

Andrews believes the company is now far more resilent than before. “We are very confident with the tools that we’ve got and the procedures we’ve put in place that we’re able to get back to a position where we’re able to trade,” he says.