Fit for the Future in Financial Services

Reimagining the modern workplace

Waverton is an award-winning investment management firm dedicated to creating high-quality investment solutions and providing bespoke, personal service for private clients, advisers, charities and institutions.

The sector traditionally operates on a fixed cost model, so Waverton saw that the variable cost model of cloud computing could be leveraged for a competitive advantage. Building scalability, operational resilience and enhancing security were top of the Waverton team’s minds. Furthermore, talent recruitment and retention in investment management is highly competitive, so the ability to implement modern, flexible working practices was another strong driver for exploring what cloud technologies could deliver for the business. 

Mudassar Ulhaq, Chief Information Officer at Waverton, explains, “We felt the cloud journey should commence from key technologies. The support we had from Microsoft to understand the costs of cloud infrastructure and best practice management was pivotal. For us, the Microsoft Exchange environment was an obvious starting place. Microsoft 365 was a great opportunity for us to evaluate the cloud.” 

Security is fundamental to Waverton

As well as Microsoft Exchange, some mobile users had been using a third-party email app. Waverton saw Microsoft 365 as an opportunity to move away from both the on-premises Exchange server and remove this third-party infrastructure and associated security risks. 

From the very start, the Waverton team focused on the critical role of security in digital transformation. Ulhaq cites tight integration between apps on Microsoft Azure and its native security tools as a key reason for choosing a Microsoft-first approach. 

“Security is one of the most important elements of cloud architecture. Confidentiality and integrity are vital for us and we need to be able to reassure the business we can protect client data,” explains Ulhaq. 

Building a best-practice framework 

The migration was managed by Adnan Uz-Zaman, Network Infrastructure Lead at Waverton. He concurs: “Security is of fundamental importance for us. Through the deployment of Microsoft 365, we have been able to adopt a framework that has enabled us to build further policies to reduce the risk of data leakage.”

The framework developed had a hugely important role to play in the way Waverton responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a proven and secure framework, the business could fast track its digital workplace strategy to ensure staff could work remotely to support clients without disruption.

Acceleration through the pandemic

Upon lockdown, the Waverton team deployed Surface devices, Windows 10, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft One Drive to enable staff to work seamlessly at home. This effectively fast-tracked a three-year project into nine months. The momentum of necessity during the pandemic has enabled Waverton to rapidly transition to a new and improved way of working.  

“The migration we’ve already completed to Microsoft Surface devices, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure not only achieves this, but it gives us significant security and operational advantages,” says Ulhaq. “For example, we’ve removed the whole concept of ‘bring your own device’ from our organisation and that alone eliminates many security concerns.”

In particular, the deployment of Microsoft Surface devices for all staff has enabled a level of integration between platform, app and device that brings unique productivity and security benefits. “Microsoft Surface devices are premium devices, but the efficiencies and productivity gains outweigh the cost of the devices,” says Ulhaq.

Automating and streamlining security processes

As part of the digital workplace strategy, Waverton chose to leverage Microsoft InTune and Auto Pilot. 

“InTune has been a great asset for us,” says Uz-Zaman. “We’re now at a stage where a user just needs an Internet connection for us to install a secure corporate device for them. Following a three to four-hour automated schedule that runs in the background, they have access to all the apps they need. This has enabled us to deploy all our services and over 140 Microsoft Surface devices remotely during lockdown. The support we received from Microsoft gave us confidence we are deploying in a best practice manner. And we’ve been able to lock down corporate data and devices, save admin time and enhance our security and data governance.”

Waverton took the decision at the same time to adopt Microsoft Sentinel. This has helped the business eliminate additional third-party tools from its environment, reducing cost and risk at the same time.

“Now we have one platform that looks across all our estate,” says Ulhaq. “One system, one skillset means greater understanding and more effectiveness. We have a more comprehensive solution and we can focus staff training on the Microsoft solutions, so we have broader security competence through our team. And when moving assets into Microsoft, who knows better about the security of Microsoft solutions?”

New cost management transparency

Microsoft Azure will provide the compute, storage and network resources needed for any IT service. Ulhaq says, “The platform is more scalable and we’ve become far more agile in enabling services. Plus, we can now develop a cost centre for services which we could never have done previously.”

In this way, the cost management benefits of Microsoft Azure go beyond shifting from a cap-ex to op-ex model. Waverton now has greater transparency of costs, enabling granular allocation per service or business unit. Furthermore, costs can be optimised by scaling up and down service provision according to demand – not everything has to run 24/7.

An enhanced security posture

“There’s a lot more focus on resilience from regulators now,” explains Allen. “They want to be sure about your business continuity planning and availability of services so there is no disruption to end-clients or to our ability to continue to manage their assets.” 

Moving services to Microsoft Azure has made a significant tightening of both recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives possible. The fulfilment of these objectives has been tested and demonstrated. 

Enhancing communications using Teams Phone

“The last twelve months has highlighted how the technology has enabled us to carry on our operations and enabled far more collaboration internally and with clients,” says Ulhaq. “Microsoft Teams telephony was the next step. Because calls with clients need to be recorded, we had to ensure staff had the capability to record those calls when working at home.”

The business brought forward its plans to switch to Teams Phone to further enhance the communications capabilities. Uz-Zaman explains: “We ran Teams and the incumbent telephone system in parallel for a month to allow time for testing. We had a quick switchover one Friday evening and the deployment was seamless. On Monday morning all staff were using their own Waverton phone number. We were very pleased with how it went.”

Beyond the original vision

As well as enabling staff to make calls from their devices with recording facilities, the deployment of Teams Phone enabled the creation of Teams Rooms. Like many companies, Waverton reviewed its office plan in the wake of the pandemic. Staff were offered flexible working with the Microsoft Surface devices enabling seamless hot desking. This freed up office space which could be used for the new meeting rooms. 

Staff can now walk into the rooms and join Microsoft Teams meetings to collaborate with colleagues who are working from home or to attend external client meetings. Waverton has even successfully run client pitches from the new Teams Rooms.

“The support we have received from Microsoft has underpinned our journey and helped us understand how we can deliver a modern workplace,” says Ulhaq. “Over the last twelve months we’ve seen the benefits of being a Microsoft house. Working remotely was a complete shift in mindset, but feedback from users has been very positive. Staff love the collaboration of Microsoft 365 and Teams. It’s a far more seamless experience.”

Allen agrees: “The pandemic expanded our scope but this has given us greater flexibility. We can now adapt and be agile and our business resilience is improved. We have exceeded what we set out to achieve.”