Case study
Shurgard chooses Colt’s data
centre and reduces OPEX
costs by 40%
Customer name
Shurgard
Business
Europe’s market-leading
provider of self-storage
solutions for businesses and
individuals
Sector
Business services
Challenge
Improve disaster recovery
capabilities to ensure
business continuity. Move
to a highly secure and
advanced data centre and
minimise the risk of failure.
Services
Optimum IT Infrastructure;
Optimum Unified
Communications; Optimum
Managed Networking;
Optimum Connectivity
Products
Colocation; IP VPN; VoIP
Access; IP Voice Solution;
LANLink
Self-storage solutions
provider significantly
improves disaster
recovery capabilities with
Colt’s highly secure and
advanced Colocation
services.
Shurgard is the leading self-storage
company in Europe, and is part of Public
Storage, the largest storage solutions
provider in the United States. The
European operations span 189 storage
locations in Belgium, Denmark, France,
Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and
United Kingdom. Every day, around 500
employees - both store managers and staff
working from Shurgard’s European head
office in Belgium - work to provide tailormade storage solutions to their 100,000
business and private customers.
To support the European operations of
the company, Shurgard hosts its business
critical applications in Colt’s primary,
carrier neutral data centre in Belgium,
including the in-house developed CRM
solution IPharos, the centrally managed
IP telephony solution and systems that
take care of processing e-mails, bookings,
payments and web enquiries. With
important customer related applications
running centrally, the availability of
Shurgard’s data centre environment is
critical to ensure maximum customer
service levels.
Making sure that business critical
applications are available
To stay a flexible and competitive business,
Shurgard decided to move from a CAPEX
to an OPEX based model, which led
to the IT team opting for a virtualised
environment and cloud-based services.
As a result, the resilience of the service
provider’s data centre environment
became even more important. At the same
time, Shurgard needed to improve their IT
disaster recovery and business continuity
capabilities.
Shurgard wanted to move their IT
equipment from the existing Rotterdam
node to a new data centre in the
Netherlands with colocation capabilities
similar to Colt’s primary data centre in
Belgium. “With our second data centre
location becoming more critical to the
overall business continuity plan, we were
looking to move to a data centre that
could meet the same high standards as
the Nossegem location. We wanted a
fully mirrored data centre environment
to ensure our business would not be
impacted if one of the locations stopped
being available. We also required the new
location to be closer to our head office to
save time on emergency and maintenance
visits.” says Dany Bruggeman, IT and
Project Director at Shurgard.
// Colt’s project management capabilities, and their
experience in supporting customers with moving IT
infrastructure, really helped to make the migration
straightforward and hassle-free. //
Dany Bruggeman
IT and Project Director
Shurgard Europe
For Bruggeman, the impact of critical applications
becoming unavailable in the main data centre and the
redundant site, was too high. In these situations, the store
workers would need to switch to manual processes, such
as processing reservations on paper. New and changed
customer information would then need to be transferred
in the central CRM system, so doing things manually first,
doubles the workload and brings down staff productivity
significantly.
The location change was scheduled for the weekend to
minimise the risks of complete downtime in the unlikely
event that the primary data centre would fail during
the move. “Colt’s project management capabilities, and
their experience in supporting customers with moving
IT infrastructure, really helped to make the migration
straightforward and hassle-free. We are very pleased that
it took us only two days to have all our IT systems up and
running in our new data centre,” states Bruggeman.
Hassle-free move to a highly secure and
advanced new data centre
By choosing Colt’s Colocation services in Roosendaal and
in Nossegem, Shurgard now has a full-fledged activeactive data centre environment. To ensure high availability
of applications, the systems are replicated either in real
time or twice a day, depending on the criticality of the
application. Bruggeman continues: “The space efficiency
features in Colt’s colocation facilities allowed us to reduce
the number of racks by 40% and save over €15,000 on
annual data centre costs. This meant we significantly
upgraded our second data centre without increasing the
overall costs. And the flexibility of both Colt data centres
will enable us to quickly and cost effectively adapt to
our constantly evolving needs to support our business
growth, as well as our plans for desktop virtualisation and
transferring more applications into the Cloud.”
As the European self-storage market leader was already
familiar with Colt’s Colocation service, Bruggeman and
his team looked at Colt’s carrier neutral data centre in
Roosendaal. The decision to move to this award winning
facility was easy and simple. “The Colt data centre in
Roosendaal ticked all boxes: capabilities to optimise space
efficiently and tier 3+ classification for high availability,
supported with superior security levels through ISO
27001 certification and Colt’s ‘Seven Layers of Security’
approach. Also, the Roosendaal data centre is located
closer to our Nossegem location so getting there saves us
30% on travel time.”
Shurgard and Colt worked closely together to ensure
that the relocation of the IT equipment from Rotterdam
to Roosendaal was as swift and smooth as possible.
In addition to setting up a project plan, Colt took care
of the design, testing and on-site support during the
migration to the Roosendaal data centre. By combining
best practices and a tailored approach to meet specific
customer requirements, Colt was prepared to take care of
virtually every potential problem that could arise between
the dismantling of the equipment at the old location and
installation of the kit in the new data centre.
Integration and consolidation deliver true
business value
The move to the Colt data centre followed the contract
renewal for the Unified Communications services that
Shurgard had already been using for a number of years.
The communication services include Colt’s IP Voice and
VoIP Access, enabling the company to centrally manage
IP voice traffic while taking full control of call routing
across all countries in Europe and adopting further call
centre technology. The phone is still the company’s most
important sales channel, so the effectiveness of the
communications platform plays a key role in Shurgard’s
overall performance.
Colt IP VPN and LANLink services provide optimised
connectivity between the storage locations and the data
centres. With these solutions, Shurgard can offer secure
and high speed access to business applications to staff
working in one of the 189 self-storage stores.
When first implemented, the integrated Colt solution
helped Shurgard to raise customer service levels by
efficiently routing incoming calls and improving the
number of answered calls by 50%. This improvement also
supported Shurgard in capturing €5 million of missed
annual revenue, and by consolidating its voice services
with Colt, reduced recurring telephony costs by 30%.
Colt’s information delivery platform has played a key role
in Shurgard’s IT, communications and network strategy,
enabling the storage solutions provider to drive cost
savings, increase sales performance, improve service
levels, whilst ensuring business continuity. “We know
we are a demanding customer,” Bruggeman concludes.
“But Colt does a great job in listening to our needs and
delivering value to our business. Over the years we have
built up a solid business relationship and we are looking
forward to expanding it even more.”
For more information, please contact us on:
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7390 3900
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: www.colt.net
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