Case Study:
TSP Engineering Ltd
Sector: Engineering
Challenges
GMET Engineering acquired TSP Engineering in 2022 from the Jingye owned, British Steel. At that time, TSP Engineering had been owned previously by Tata Steel and Corus and was entrenched in old legacy systems as well as heavily reliant on British Steel IT infrastructure. With a limited IT resource internally, there was a requirement to separate completely from British Steel’s IT infrastructure and develop its own capabilities but in just 3 months to meet the acquisition agreement’s deadline.
All of this whilst still allowing the business to operate fully and maintain its strict security and compliance requirements that are tightly laid down when working in industries such as nuclear and defence.
Solutions
CentriVault developed a full technical solution and provided supporting resources, including connecting with their Microsoft Gold partner to produce and manage a fast-track route map over just 3 months.
The solution being to fully migrate all IT and network infrastructure and devices from British Steel to a new TSP cloud and on-premises environment. All with security and compliance constantly being at the forefront of the works.
The Implementation
Three teams were utilised to focus on the project management, security & compliance and the technical services needed to implement the requirements. Full time resources were provided over the 3 months to support the company and deliver on the ambitious and challenging task. Weekly project reports were delivered to the Board and tight controls were added to help manage spend and delivery. A working group was created with British Steel, TSP Engineering and CentriVault’s team – all linked with GMET IT as the group IT representative.
The implementation covered key areas needed to detangle and migrate from complex environments into a new TSP domain. The work required areas in Microsoft infrastructure (including Azure), networking such as firewalls, domain accounts, server configuration, policies and licensing. All with security in mind, therefore malware protection, frequent vulnerability scanning, and endpoint protection were amongst the early workstreams.
The whole process also had to ensure compliance was maintained for the important Cyber Essentials Plus certification that the company held and was required to be kept compliant by their customers.
The Outcome
Against a challenging timeframe, in mid-June TSP Engineering successfully separated all of its IT infrastructure from British Steel and into a new TSP domain. Disruption was kept to an absolute minimum even though the company ran shifts into the evening. All users were able to work on the domain and a new IT helpdesk was established to deal effectively with any issues derived from the significant work undertaken.
It was confirmed that this had been the single biggest IT transformation for TSP Engineering in the last 40 years – all within the timeframe and budget originally set at the start of the project. The outcome was to present the new improvements to customers as the solution now was completely UK controlled and had additional security and resilience features. This included improved patching and endpoint management, malware protection, high availability firewalls, improved backup regime and added advanced threat protection.
The company received praise from its customers and the GMET group avoided any late charges by the selling organisation which would have been added should the end separation date had been delayed.
Project Highlights
1
Transformed & Supported
-
Transformed an aging and externally controlled IT estate into a more modern and internally controlled one.
-
Removed legacy risks of older operating systems and platforms.
-
Delivered training to empower internal IT staff
-
Implemented a new SLA-led IT service helpdesk.
2
Resilience & Compliance
-
Added additional resilience and continuity measures.
-
Improved endpoint control and patch management.
-
Maintained compliance and recertification of Cyber Essentials Plus.
3
Provided Opportunities
-
Achieved strong customer feedback and recognition of the project’s achievement. ·
-
Provided scalable opportunities for further improvements such as implementing VOIP, improved secure remote working and updating of business-critical applications.