BGF scales up with Azure Cloud and Microsoft 365 to underpin digital transformation

As an investor, working with some of the UK & Ireland’s most innovative companies, BGF had seen first-hand the productivity, security, and scalability benefits of born-in-the-cloud start-ups. The firm had a grand vision for digital transformation, and it chose Kocho as its cloud services partner to make it happen.

BGF utilised the power of the Azure Cloud, Microsoft 365, and Kocho’s managed services to streamline business processes, improve security posture, and enable seamless remote working.

Investing in Azure Cloud and secure modern working

Over the course of a two-year engagement, Kocho worked with BGF to deliver the following key solutions:

1. Migration of all apps and data into the Azure Cloud.
2. Enabling secure and productive modern working.
3. Managed services to keep BGF’s IT infrastructure secure.

Putting data and services at the heart of the organisation

Utilising the Azure Cloud as part of BGF’s digital transformation was a critical factor in improving business agility and the ability to grow at scale – providing the seamless access to apps and data it needed to power an agile investment business.

Once Kocho had helped BGF migrate all data and apps into Azure, the organisation was able to take advantage of cloud-scale data intelligence to build Power BI dashboards enabling smarter management and investment decisions.

A further crucial benefit of BGF’s migration to Azure was the management of all user identities within Azure Active Directory. This ensured seamless single sign-on (SSO) to all apps, and secure access and authentication to BGF’s critical information.

Securing modern working practices with Microsoft 365

BGF employs more than 170 people across 16 different regional offices, all requiring secure anywhere, anytime access to apps and data to get their jobs done.

Alongside BGF’s Azure Cloud transformation work, Kocho also helped to deploy Microsoft 365 solutions that would provide a secure modern working platform to keep the organisation one step ahead of the competition. These solutions included:

• Windows 10
• Intune for modern device management and security
• Azure Information Protection and Data Loss Prevention solutions
• Microsoft Teams – for cutting edge, secure collaboration

“As a growth investment organisation, it’s critical for our employees and partners to be able to collaborate in a secure and productive manner – often sharing sensitive data. It was a top priority for BGF to provide the necessary tools to enable seamless access to our data, without compromising on security and compliance.

“Tools such as Teams and Windows 10 have improved our productivity and collaboration, while solutions such as AIP and Intune ensure we have the correct controls in place to keep our devices and data secure.” – Lyndon Arnold (Head of Information Technology and Business Intelligence)

Security and compliance confidence with Kocho’s managed services

In addition to BGF’s digital transformation vision, it was important to ensure system resilience, availability, security, and compliance at all times.

To this end, Kocho provided its managed service offering to ensure BGF always had a fully GDPR compliant backup process, with a disaster recovery strategy and effective business continuity plans.

The Kocho ISO27001 compliant managed service offering is helping BGF to minimise and mitigate the risks of data breaches, manage stakeholder compliance expectations, and provide an external source of monitoring and control over the performance and resilience of the IT estate.

Key Takeaways