Anderson, Anderson and Brown (AAB) are a 250 user chartered accountancy organisation based in Aberdeen.

They provide a range of HR and financial services to customers through a number of hosted applications, often based on the Access Dimensions suite of software, and are looking to grow this aspect of their business over the coming years.

For their initial offering, AAB opted for a traditional hosting provider. However, this did not prove a reliable, scalable or cost-effective service for their growth needs.

ElysianIT were selected as their partner to assist with the design of an initial infrastructure to host the applications involved. Azure was recommended for both the immediate need as well as for hosting their O365 identity infrastructure (ADFS and AD Connect) to provide greater resilience and redundancy.

Where possible consolidation was factored into the design, ensuring that the Azure consumption running costs for compute and licensing (e.g. SQL) were optimised for both the production and test environments, whilst also allowing for scalability on demand.

The build phase was conducted based on a scripted model, enabling the environments to be swiftly recreated at any point should the need arise.

The build phase comprised the following activities:

• Creation of the Azure Infrastructure Deployment Scripts
• Set up of networking and establishing Site to Site VPN connectivity
• Implementation of Network Security Groups
• Creation of Web (Production & Testing) and SQL Virtual Machines
• Configuration of Load Balancing and Availability Sets
• Installation of IIS Roles and Configuration of SQL Server
• Azure Application Gateway configured to secure public web-based traffic
• Encryption in transit and at rest
• Azure Backup Vault and recovery processes
• Post Deployment Acceptance Testing
• Set up and configuration of Operations Management Suite for monitoring and alerts

Subsequent to the successful implementation and handover of the infrastructure layer, AAB installed the applications onto the environment, ready to support their existing and new client base.

AAB then entered into a support contract with ElysianIT, covering their entire Azure estate, to ensure that should any issues arise effecting this customer-facing service, they had SLA backed technical expertise on hand.