Pension Protection Fund chooses Microsoft Azure to drive efficiency and innovation

Choosing Microsoft and Microsoft Azure 

The PPF had two hard deadlines, each with significant financial implications if they weren’t met. First, to complete the handover from the managed services partner. Second, to exit the co-lo datacentres.  

Initial work covered a redesign of the network and setting up the platform and connectivity to move further into the cloud to enable innovation. 

Simon Liste recalls, “Following review and evaluation, we saw that it made most sense to partner with Microsoft Azure, especially given what we wanted to achieve in terms of a serverless environment. The versatility of Azure and its services also made it attractive – as well as its facilitation of security, management, monitoring and being able to seamlessly move onto newer technology.” 

“We are very selective with our partners because we need to make sure that they share our same values and ethics,” continues Simon Liste. “Microsoft is very strong on understanding and matching our values, especially our goals around sustainability. As a public body, we want to do what’s right for the world around us. Our sustainability strategy and commitment are an extension of what we are doing as an organisation, a good thing.” 

The start of the PPF’s cloud journey

In year two, the cloud migration began. The PPF added collaboration tools and looked for opportunities to converge, simplify and rationalise. Then COVID-19 hit. “We had a lot of engagement with Microsoft to ensure that within 24 hours everybody was working at home,” explains Simon Liste. 

The cloud migration was completed entirely during the COVID-19 lockdown period. The workloads were largely server based, but the first workload migrated to the cloud was Microsoft 365 – PPF’s preferred choice for staff productivity, communication and collaboration.  

“The integration we get by using Microsoft 365 with Azure made Azure really the only choice,” says Chris Douglas, “And when we looked at the identity and security model, Microsoft Azure ticked all the boxes.” 

Drawing on the support of Microsoft 

“We were able to leverage all the support from Microsoft,” Chris Douglas continues. “We drew on a lot of Microsoft assistance throughout our Azure cloud adoption journey thanks to the Unified Support and Enterprise agreements we already had in place. That was support we wouldn’t have got from another cloud services vendor.” 

The PPF drew on the expertise of Microsoft’s Cloud Solutions Architecture team. In particular, the Virtual Datacentre Tour was interesting and valuable, says Chris Douglas. “You can’t compare what we get from Azure with another datacentre. It’s like comparing apples with pears. Instead of a narrow, single datacentre capability, with Azure we get this metropolis of capability. It’s so much more. The risks of something going wrong have significantly reduced for us simply because of the advanced backend infrastructure that is Microsoft Azure. It's so resilient in its core design and our services just inherit all of that.” 

Zakirya Mohammad, Senior Infrastructure & Cloud Specialist, agrees, “Microsoft gave us a lot of advice. We followed that advice and it’s turned out for the best; it’s been really nice to have them on hand.” 

Developing internal skills 

The infrastructure team also made use of the courses and certifications offered by Microsoft, to become certified in Microsoft Azure.  

“As we’re knee deep in this fresh technology adoption, it made sense to finalise that with certifications,” explains Chris Douglas, “We wanted the team to leverage the free training and free certification tracks. It helped reinforce things we were learning as we went along or helped clarify or fill in a few gaps. I’m an avid advocate of Microsoft training: certification was a good learning experience for our team.” 

Zakirya Mohammad concurs, “As an engineer, you want the opportunity to improve your skills. For some of the team, it was their first-time using Azure. Having those resources and labs available really helped them get up to speed.”  

Simon Liste adds, “We benefit from our support agreements with Microsoft, not just in terms of immediate response but in terms of consultancy and training. Our internal teams are happier because they are growing and learning. And the different kinds of support – whether around sustainability, application or strategic – it helps ensure there’s clarity.” 

Boosting collaboration and facilitating flexible working 

The business moved to Microsoft 365, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online to further strengthen business continuity and make it easier to scale up and down as appropriate. Adding more automation to the back office has boosted efficiency and created more opportunities for collaboration and innovation.  

“Another thing that was hugely beneficial for us was adopting Microsoft Intune as our mobile device management solution,” says Chris Douglas. “Switching to Intune and its much tighter integration has enabled us to push out more applications onto the mobile devices, such as our HR and holiday booking systems. We can get much more from our use of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Exchange. It’s enabled us to open up access to information much better.” 

“And it means a lot of the management overhead for those systems has gone,” adds Zakirya Mohammad, “especially because, with Azure Active Directory used in conjunction with Intune, we’re using the same multifactor authentication and identity management solution across the products.” 

Hardening the security posture brings further efficiencies by centralising IT management tools 

“The other big benefit is the reliability and the disaster recovery capabilities that all of these platforms and services offer,” Chris Douglas adds, “It’s so much more than we could have achieved if we had stayed with an on-prem model.” 

“We’re now moving towards using more of the security tools that Microsoft offers to make our IT operations much more streamlined,” says Simon Liste, “That is helping our de-risking and growth. We take a multi-layered approach to security and we’ve been able to leverage the Microsoft security solutions, including Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Sentinel and the Azure security services. And we plan to leverage the AI and ML within the Microsoft Sentinel suite.” 

“It’s definitely improved our position from a security perspective,” agrees Chris Douglas. “As well as modernising our hardening techniques, we have workload and network hardening all in one place. It’s all available within one single portal – which is great – we have all these management capabilities at our fingertips. It adds to the time efficiency for my team.” 

The PPF is beginning to draw in information from Azure Monitor. Chris Douglas explains, “It’s been great from a security perspective. It consolidates all the data so you can start leveraging the tight integration we get between Microsoft Defender, Intune and Azure Active Directory. All of that data goes into Microsoft Sentinel and it makes the analysis more sophisticated and gives us more automation opportunities. It’s just going to give us so much more visibility into user and network behaviour.” 

Driving productivity and efficiency in IT management 

By making the most of the native Microsoft Azure tools, PPF is reducing the workload for the IT team. Chris Douglas explains, “On a technical level we’ve also been able to replace a lot of the third-party tools with Azure services: load balancers, single sign-on with Azure Active Directory, multifactor authentication, including self-service password resets.” 

The multifactor authentication has reduced the calls to the service desk about password issues by 60 percent.   

“I’ve been able to reduce my third-party vendor list by half. It simplifies our report processes and procedures. And it means my team is just more effective,” Chris Douglas states. “We can now do more with – if not less – the same amount of PPF resource.” 

Zakirya Mohammad agrees, “It’s freed us to devote our time to other projects brought forward by the business. It’s given us more time to innovate.” 

Driving productivity and efficiency in multiple areas of the business 

Work in Azure, to develop a new analytics platform and data visualisation capabilities, is delivering even greater efficiencies. Simon Liste states, “Our data platform work has streamlined activities that used to take around 30 weeks’ worth of effort down into about a week to generate that same output.” 

Greater efficiency has also come with greater agility. Chris Douglas explains, “Microsoft Azure has enabled us to provide massive bursts of compute power for our risk management team. We would not have been able to meet that compute demand otherwise. Running on Azure we’ve reduced their risk modelling exercise to 12 hours – so we saved them about 48 hours on every risk modelling scenario they run.” 

“We’ve given those teams the ability to manage those resources,” adds Zakirya Mohammad, “so when they’re not being used, they can power them off. We didn’t have that capability before. We’ve also set up budgeting alerts so the users can self-manage.” 

Rationalising and convergence deliver real efficiencies  

Today, 90 percent of the PPF’s workloads are in Microsoft Azure and it has already decommissioned one datacentre. The other has been rationalised by 60 percent. From a server perspective, the footprint has reduced from over 900 virtual entities to 398 thanks to the team’s work on rationalisation and convergence. Further, a twelve-node Hyper-V estate has been reduced to three nodes. 

“That isn’t just more efficient in terms of footprint, it’s also more efficient in terms of the management, security and monitoring,” emphasises Simon Liste. “We’ve also had support from Microsoft to rationalise our licencing and that makes it more cost efficient too.” 

The next step will be to move to Microsoft Teams Telephony for the front-end communication with a contact centre solution hosted in Microsoft Azure. This will drive the legacy datacentre footprint down even further. 

Chris Douglas comments, “I do like the way Microsoft has a very well-structured lifecycle management framework with plenty of advance notification. That enables us to plan much better.” 

Cost savings and Microsoft’s well-architected framework 

The PPF is still in the process of analysing the cost savings in terms of decommissioning a data centre, reducing the on-premises footprint, reducing the third-party software solutions and server rationalisations. This is expected to show cost savings, even without considering the time savings from efficiency improvements and the ease of managing the enhanced IT estate.  

“We are now in the process of following Microsoft’s Well-Architected Framework, so that’s helping us with some cost optimisations for our Azure usage as well,” adds Chris Douglas. “We’ve optimised everything we can – which has reduced our costs by 20 percent. It also helps us with our sustainability goals.” 

Social responsibility and sustainability improvements achieved 

“By moving workloads in Microsoft Azure, we have lowered our carbon footprint,” reports Simon Liste, “The server utilisation alone ensures a much-reduced footprint. Then there is the energy efficiency of the Azure datacentres themselves.”  

Collaboration improvements have delivered sustainability benefits too – not least in the reduction of paper being used across the organisation. “We hope to drive this even further with our use of Azure Virtual Desktop,” says Simon Liste, “Devices have a heavy environmental cost – zinc, copper, minerals of extraction and the carbon footprints that come with them. Working in collaboration with our colleagues, and our partners, to move the PPF to a single corporate issued device, and in some cases to no corporate issued device, means we contribute hugely to our sustainability strategy, and lowers our carbon, and emissions footprint.” 

Simon Liste continues, “We also know, from working with Microsoft, that by moving from our current cloud profile of virtual machines to serverless technology, our carbon footprint will drop even further. Therefore, needless to say, this a focus for my team over the coming months.” 

Looking to the future 

The improvements already made have had significant impact. “We’ve eliminated a lot of unplanned outages,” explains Simon Liste. “And we’ve been able to commission projects much faster.” 

He continues, “Sustainability is really important to us. Though, we have to be proportionate, realistic and ensure that we do not compromise performance, stability and security. I am happy to say that, with Microsoft, achieving our sustainability goals has not compromised any business functions." 

Chris Douglas adds, “For me, personally, the whole cloud adoption has been incredibly interesting – and that’s an added bonus. It’s certainly never been boring or arduous.” 

“We still have a lot of workload transformation to do,” admits Chris Douglas. “Through automation with Azure DevOps, we can automate many processes and that’s huge for risk reduction. I have an ambition to stick tightly to the infrastructure as code principle. It’s like the holy trinity: Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure and Azure DevOps. I just think it’s fantastic. The opportunities are endless.”