Wealth managers at Waverton Investment Management are experts in managing financial assets and investments to generate positive returns for their clients. But to best support clients of every size—from private individuals to large institutions and charities—the award-winning, UK-based company must itself make strategic investments to drive continuous innovation, regulatory compliance, and efficient performance. That’s why Waverton recently turned to Microsoft, choosing to upgrade its digital infrastructure and deploy technology that benefits its advisers, analysts, staff, and ultimately, high net-worth clients.
“With our plan to be fully on Azure by the end of 2023, we’ll likely achieve savings of 1,194,778 kilograms of CO2 from 2024 onward, which is an approximate 90 percent reduction compared with running all of our infrastructure on-premises.”
Mudassar Ulhaq, Chief Information Officer, Waverton Investment Management
Led by Adnan Uz-Zaman, Head of Infrastructure at Waverton Investment Management, the company started migrating to Microsoft Azure in 2020, prioritizing the ability to manage its computing power, networking, and storage in the cloud. Waverton has since leaned on Enterprise Skills Initiative teams for help upskilling its staff and navigating its overall cloud journey. “For a company of Waverton’s size, the resources that we have are always going to be limited,” says Mike Allen, Chief Operating Officer at Waverton Investment Management. “So, being able to take advantage of Microsoft’s superior size, knowledge, experience, and technology spend as we grow is something we would never achieve if we didn’t go down this road of working with it.”
With the right people, technology, skill sets, and support systems now in place, Waverton is on track to become a cloud-first financial services institution by 2023 and achieve corporate net zero emissions by 2030. And as Waverton is set to achieve an approximate 90 percent reduction of its carbon emissions by moving to the cloud, its Azure migration is proving to be a solid investment.
Supporting the modern workplace with Azure and Microsoft 365
Historically, Waverton relied on an on-premises datacenter with failover disaster recovery services in a partner-managed colocation site. The complexities of this model and of running a datacenter on-premises led to costly infrastructure maintenance and upgrades while also limiting flexibility, growth, and the adoption of new technologies—all particularly critical capabilities given Waverton’s recent transition to a modern, hybrid workplace. So, the company set two primary objectives when it began its cloud transformation: to enhance business resiliency and deliver a more flexible, modern way of working for front-office and client-facing users. “Microsoft exceeded our expectations with its Azure service delivery and the support we received,” says Mudassar Ulhaq, Chief Information Officer at Waverton Investment Management.
Throughout its journey, Waverton’s IT infrastructure, support, and development staff had opportunities to learn about new cloud capabilities and work with a variety of Azure resources. “Microsoft helped with training ahead of the migration so that our staff could support the business and other employees after Azure services began running,” says Ulhaq. Those services currently include a comprehensive range of Azure resources, including Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup for supporting business continuity and disaster recovery for its application workloads and Intune for managing staff laptops.
Because Waverton prioritized building a base network architecture that provided resiliency across its datacenters, it decided to define primary and secondary datacenters, designating UK South as the primary and UK West as its failover. “Having a setup that resembled our existing disaster recovery capabilities allowed us to decommission our physical disaster recovery datacenter and move closer to full cloud adoption, ensuring data is always available,” says Ulhaq. “We’ve migrated 70 percent of our server infrastructure to the UK South datacenter, and the remaining 30 percent—our development infrastructure—will be brought over next year.”
Waverton also uses Microsoft 365 E5 extensively, deploying Microsoft Teams in place of its previous telephone network and communication channels and tapping into SharePoint for file storage and sharing. Any company it acquires is given the same E5 license. “With our recent acquisitions, we’ve been able to integrate their businesses into our Microsoft cloud tenant far more efficiently, whereas it might have been more difficult running an on-premises datacenter,” Ulhaq remarks.
Tapping into cloud security enhancements
As a financial services institution, Waverton has a heavy security focus and appreciates being able to use Microsoft Defender with Azure. It also uses Microsoft Defender for Cloud to manage and protect its entire estate and Microsoft Sentinel on the back end to manage event logs for security monitoring.
“We can now oversee the entire Waverton estate in one dashboard and then use Microsoft Sentinel to highlight or alert us to any potential cyberthreats,” says Ulhaq. And the company has continued introducing new services, such as Power BI, to broaden data visibility. “Like many businesses inside and outside of the financial services sector, Waverton hasn’t always gotten enough out of its data,” adds Allen. “We want to look at data in a different way, and Power BI will help us improve the visualization of it.”
Building a better business and world with Azure
As collaboration with Microsoft continued, Waverton identified an opportunity to tap into the power of Azure and the cloud to support its sustainability targets. The company’s existing sustainability program centered around responsible investment, equality, diversity, and inclusion efforts, its environmental footprint, and supporting its local communities. Moving to the cloud aligned perfectly with its goals to reduce emissions and step up for climate change. “Every business needs to look at what sustainability contributions they can make, and we wanted to ensure that we’re managing our buildings, infrastructure, and all of our activities in the most responsible way,” says Michelle Newman, Corporate Sustainability Manager at Waverton Investment Management. “While there were a number of other drivers for Azure, it does have strong environmental benefits.”
The Microsoft sustainability team ran an assessment of Waverton as it embarked on its Azure migration, giving the company a chance to break down its carbon savings and see how its footprint might have grown had it continued to maintain on-premises servers. “To date, we’ve observed a 60 percent reduction of our carbon footprint with Azure—that’s 5,250 kilograms of CO2 saved,” says Ulhaq. “With our plan to be fully on Azure by the end of 2023, we’ll likely achieve savings of 1,194,778 kilograms of CO2 from 2024 onward, which is an approximate 90 percent reduction compared with running all of our infrastructure on-premises.”
With these insights, the company continues to explore opportunities that support improved efficiencies across the business. Waverton cites portable Microsoft Surface devices as one way it’s been able to reduce CO2 emissions, eliminating the need for traditional, always-on desktop infrastructure and simultaneously giving staff more autonomy and freedom. “The next couple of years will show how efficiencies like this can really help reduce an organization’s carbon footprint and contribute to better business and good governance,” reflects Newman.
“Moving with the times”
Waverton is far beyond where it started and where it expected to be, yet it continues to meet new targets and set new ambitions internally and externally. Whether its improving business resilience, finding new ways to enhance security and data protection, or reducing its ecological footprint, it all comes back to delivering better services faster to its clients and setting an example for others.
“The infrastructure that we now have in Azure and our ability to rapidly deploy services has no doubt allowed us to be far more efficient, do more with less, and bring services to our business and clients far quicker compared with our previous hardware estate,” says Ulhaq. Adds Allen, “With Azure, I think we’ve shown that we’re a forward-looking business and moving with the times rather than just rehashing what might have worked before.”
Find out more about Waverton Investment Management on LinkedIn.
“We can now oversee the entire Waverton estate in one dashboard and then use Microsoft Sentinel to highlight or alert us to any potential cyberthreats.”
Mudassar Ulhaq, Chief Information Officer, Waverton Investment Management
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