Trinity Fire & Security Systems selects iland

Trinity Fire & Security Systems has been using iland Secure Cloud and iland Secure Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to host and protect the company’s workloads, marking a transition away from on-premises data centres as a means to enable future growth.

Trinity Fire & Security Systems is a provider of fire detection, fire safety, life safety and security systems based in the UK. For over 20 years, Trinity has helped businesses ensure the safety of their people, property and operations by offering quality design, installation, commission and aftercare tailor-made for each client. With customer support teams operating from five regional offices and long-standing partnerships with leading fire and security technology manufacturers, the company is able to deliver the highest level of technical expertise on the market today.

As Trinity’s business grew, delivering more contracts across a wider spectrum of industry types and sizes, Lee Angell, IT director, noted a snowball effect taking place — more customers meant more data, which in turn meant more resources needed to support the company’s data centres. From there, Angell had two options: invest even more funding and resources into expanding Trinity’s current data centre infrastructure or investigate new opportunities and technologies, particularly hosted cloud providers, that could offer the business greater flexibility. He chose the latter.

“Our current data centre was becoming more and more expensive to maintain and we were responsible for training and managing our own team,” said Angell. “As part of the business case, we factored in the staff effort required to maintain the data centre, whereas that isn’t a concern for us now. We've been given more flexibility. We have a small team and therefore the added agility was a good benefit for us.”

Before choosing iland, Trinity also considered larger hyper-scale cloud providers, but they ultimately didn’t provide the agility and flexibility Angell and his team needed. Most cloud providers attempt to offer complete solutions, but the reality is, every customer is at a different point in their cloud journey with different requirements for success. iland’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is designed to meet each customer where they are by addressing the most common challenges associated with cloud adoption, while also eliminating the compromises found with other providers.

“We did research on other providers, looking in terms of their flexibility for change. We were coming across obstacles, for example, it could take up to five days to implement a change. That really didn’t suit the flexibility we required. We can take on contracts very fast in this organisation and we needed to have the ability to scale up very quickly,” said Angell. “We came to the conclusion that iland was the best fit for the business. With iland, we’ve found an unmatched visibility into and control over our environment, especially with the engagement of the account manager. We can reduce or add as the business flexes with the current pandemic and with growth and opportunities.”

“No two organisations are the same, which means no two cloud journeys are the same. Our IaaS solution is designed with this at heart,” said Sam Woodcock, iland senior director of cloud strategy, based in EMEA. “As with Trinity Fire & Security Systems, we work tirelessly to remove the common obstacles involved with migrating critical applications and workloads to the cloud, while also retaining the flexibility and agility that gets lost with large hyperscalers.”

When the coronavirus pandemic hit early last year, Trinity already had its workloads migrated onto iland’s Secure Cloud infrastructure. All things considered, this made for a relatively “comfortable” experience, according to Angell. With increased visibility via the award-winning iland Secure Cloud Console, which offers the ability to monitor and manage a variety of workloads over a single pane of glass, and a majority of employees already equipped to work remotely, business was able to proceed uninterrupted.

"We already knew what the iland solution could deliver in terms of home working capability,” said Angell. “There wasn't a concern or a rush to move to or set up a solution because we already had iland Secure Cloud in place. We were very comfortable in that regard and very lucky to have had the solution already."

Opting for the iland Secure Cloud offered Trinity a number of other ancillary benefits, including added protection from cyberthreats like ransomware with iland Secure DRaaS. Although Angell said the fear of ransomware didn’t factor into the company’s decision to move to the cloud, he admitted the added protection provides even more peace of mind. Angell also noted that iland’s dedicated compliance team and certifications were an important part of his team’s pre-qualifying process.

“We do feel comfortable using iland Secure Cloud and being protected from ransomware and all the rest of it. It's added an additional layer of security on top of the security we already had,” said Angell.

He concluded: "I'd say iland Secure Cloud is flexible, agile, and secure. I'd recommend partnering with iland because it's a company that seems to listen to its customers and delivers on their requirements."