SR Group Case Study

Company profile

Founded in 1987, The SR Group is a professional specialist recruitment organisation that focuses on the legal, compliance, HR, tax, treasury, marketing, sales and legal search sectors. The group comprises of companies that are all leaders in their fields: Brewer Morris, Carter Murray, Frazer Jones, Taylor Root and SR Search.

Resilient backup and disaster recovery

Central to The SR Group’s work are the recruitment application and associated systems on which client company data and candidates’ personal information and CVs are stored. With around 230 users responding to client needs, any loss of service could potentially have a serious impact on revenue. As the business has grown, the demand placed on these systems has increased accordingly. SR Group’s IT Director Stuart Pepper took a proactive approach to business continuity and protecting the company against threats to revenue and invited selected suppliers to tender for a back-up and disaster recovery solution.

TDM Group was selected as the preferred partner over the incumbent network support provider as well as a number of other competitors. Explaining why he chose to involve TDM Group, Stuart says, “Our recruitment system is vital to our work. We needed a cost-effective disaster recovery solution that would be fully managed on a 24/7 basis and be flexible enough to cater for growing infrastructure demands.

“I reviewed the market to see what was ‘out there’ to enhance the DR facilities we had in place, but before we met with TDM Group I hadn’t quite found a solution that ticked all the boxes. In contrast, TDM Group listened to what we needed and devised an off-site solution that would allow us to replicate data and failover almost instantaneously should we need to.”

Today, in the event of a major interruption, users can be instantly switched to another system and continue accessing data that has been quickly made available, either through replication or backup. Confidential candidate and client data is stored off-site in a highly secure TDM Group data centre suite, further improving compliance around data protection.

24×7 support around the world

With the disaster recovery solution up and running, Stuart turned his attention to providing more support to the group’s overseas offices to improve the user experience at five international sites: Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney and Melbourne.

Reviewing the situation at the time, he says, “With only a small IT team, based in UK, we had previously used a number of different third-parties to provide local support within other countries. Having multiple partners almost inevitably led to a lack of ownership. There were issues with the partners responsible for these sites and a certain amount of finger pointing. I decided that we would, in effect, partially outsource IT support for users and management of the on-premise infrastructure at the five offices, with one partner acting as a single point of support.”

Stuart went out to tender: “Once again, TDM Group came through, both on cost and in being able to provide round-the-clock support. Their 24/7 SmartSupport Service Desk aligns well with international operations spanning different time zones. What I’d seen of their performance over the previous twelve months in managing our disaster recovery solution gave me confidence that TDM Group would deliver when tasked with improving support for our overseas offices.”

Unified IT support

Stuart’s experience of using TDM Group for international support has subsequently reinforced his favourable impression: “In the past, when an issue occurred out of hours, staff would arrive in the morning and encounter problems when they logged on. Now TDM Group constantly monitors our systems down to the application layer. If an issue does arise overnight, they will already be working on a resolution before the situation can escalate and interrupt our staff’s working day. They have a pre-emptive approach, so that technical issues are resolved before they can begin to cause problems for our recruitment consultants. If on-site support is required, TDM Group can also provide this.”

The SR Group’s international locations now benefit from wide-ranging cover: “Previously, support was fragmented; now TDM Group manages everything and it’s much more efficient. In addition to looking after the server and networking infrastructure, they also provide diagnosis on the tools our recruitment teams need to do their job, such as PCs and laptops, mobile devices and telephone systems, and then manage the resolution to any problems on our behalf.”

In a modern working environment where not all staff work traditional 9-5 office hours, around seventy users at the five offices can call TDM Group’s SmartSupport Service Desk during an extended working day that runs from 8.00 am to 8.00 pm.

A strategic partnership

Reflecting on how the relationship with TDM Group has gone from strength to strength, Stuart says, “TDM Group has very much become our strategic partner, helping us to find the right solutions to business challenges and road mapping how to reach our goals. They act as a sounding board for new ideas, helping me to scope the future of the group’s infrastructure and developing the proof of concepts to help us pilot the technology. We have some really good discussions and it’s all part of their added value.”

Stuart sums up, “The service TDM Group provides is exemplary and they’re always happy to assist. Their professional can-do attitude really resonates and their approach is always one of ‘let’s get the problem sorted’ to protect the user from any issues. Feedback from the user community has been very positive. For all these reasons, I’ve come to regard them as a valued extension of my team.”