This transformative upgrade helps SRUC overcome intricate challenges and strengthen the college’s cloud infrastructure.

Infrastructure Modernisation: ARO and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC).

Customer Success

SRUC is a college that is centred around providing education in the land-based sector. By partnering with local and global organisations, SRUC is committed to supporting the natural economy through education, research and consultancy. SRUC aims to drive the future needs of a dynamic, innovative and competitive rural sector and is devoted to supporting a cleaner, environmentally friendly nation.

  • £530m GVA for the UK economy
  • 2023 Queen’s Anniversary Prize
  • Lineage over 100 years
  • Supported over 6000 jobs for the UK economy

ARO and SRUC

ARO has been working with SRUC for several years, supporting it with a range of solutions from networking, infrastructure, and firewalls to cloud and managed support services. ARO work closely with the team to empower its people across multiple campus locations, by providing state-of-the-art solutions from our extensive portfolio of technology partners. Most recently, ARO has provided them with an upgraded multi-cloud ecosystem by utilising Dell’s Azure Stack HCI solution.

Multi-cloud ecosystem made more efficient using Dell Azure Stack HCI.

SRUC were faced with several challenges that called for an updated cloud-first strategy:

  • Siloed Infrastructure: leading to underutilised hardware and lack of high availability for critical systems.
  • Complexity on the current platforms means patching and lifecycle management of systems consumes a significant amount of time for internal IT teams and introduces risk to the availability of college applications during maintenance.
  • Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity: Lack of testing for Disaster Recovery (DR) plans and differing technology led to complex recovery requirements.
  • Ageing Infrastructure: With technology reaching the end of life, there was an increased risk to its services.
  • Lack of segregation and traffic visibility: Its services weren’t accurately monitoring access within its data centre.

Providing SRUC with a service that exceeds its expectations.

ARO proposed updating the multi-cloud ecosystem with the Dell Azure Stack HCI knowing that it would achieve the following for SRUC:

  • Enhanced Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) Capabilities.
  • Alignment with environmental impact objectives.
  • A cloud-first strategy
  • Service offering for Research Services that is scalable, secure and offers centralised management and monitoring
  • College data was migrated to Microsoft Cloud including Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive.
  • The college’s security posture was improved via better lifecycle management, segregation of services and modern security techniques such as modern authorisation and privileged access.

Upon defining these goals, we proposed the Azure Stack HCI solution as a front-runner to encapsulate the college’s desired expectations. We worked closely with the team at SRUC to construct a solution tailored to the needs of the college to upgrade its existing infrastructure.

Dell Azure Stack HCI.

When comparing the challenges and goals of the college, the Dell Technologies Azure Stack HCI solution stood out for many reasons:

Lifecycle Management
A co-engineered solution offering tightly integrated software and hardware through a full stack lifecycle management solution, streamlining IT operations, ensuring compliance and predictability.

Delivering a Secure Cloud Experience
The solution offers unique hardware features, software capabilities, and Azure Arc integrations streamlining security and compliance management across various campus locations.

Power / Cooling
Aligning with the college’s environmental goals, the solution offers a significant reduction compared to the existing environment, with reduced power/cooling consumption by over 60%.

Integrated BC and DR
Through stretched cluster / A-sync replication, the system ensures that SRUC’s business operations can continue with minimal disruption in the event of an incident or disaster.

Our team fully deployed SRUC with the Azure Stack HCI solution, working with the team to ensure minimal disruption to business as usual.

Since deployment, the college has experienced numerous benefits and has peace of mind in its fully secure multi-cloud ecosystem.

“Implementing the Azure Stack HCI delivered by ARO has been a game-changer for our college’s IT operations. The robust features and efficient management tools have streamlined our processes, allowing us to focus more on strategic initiatives and less on routine maintenance. It’s a vital tool that supports our mission to provide a top-tier educational experience. ”- Belinda Haig, Group Manager, Information and Digital Services, SRUC