Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association

The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association is a national association helping pension professionals run better pension schemes. With over 1,300 pension scheme members, PLSA is very much the voice of pensions and lifetime savings in Westminster, Whitehall and Brussels.

Employing over 50 staff in central London, PLSA use a mix of Cloud and on-premise solutions to deliver high performing Information Technology.

What was the issue?

Over time the size of the internal IT team had grown at the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, but it was very hard to break down activity and associate costs to individual departments and functions. In addition, management wanted to embrace new IT opportunities such as cloud based services and achieve faster project deployments.

What was the answer?

Working with consultants Arcus Global, CoopSys put forward a proposal that would enable the Association to outsource IT delivery whilst retaining control of IT management and get a firm grip on activities and costs. In addition, an action plan of improvements to IT systems was proposed.

Works carried out

For many organisations, moving internal IT to a hosted framework doesn’t really yield much benefit. It can mean you end up running exactly the same set up stored in a data centre with no ability to take advantage of new developments in software and cloud services. So the Association decided to take a hybrid approach to IT that moved them into new cloud based services whilst at the same time ensuring key applications continued to run smoothly.

Specific tasks carried out included:

  • Email migration to Office 365 – Moving email ‘off premise’ is often a quick win and achievable for all organisations and it’s an easy stepping stone to embracing cloud services.
  • New virtual server set up 2012, migration of DB, DC – The existing servers were end life but ‘on premise’ applications remained a necessity so a server was deployed with virtualisation.
  • Onsite audio-visual improvements in conference rooms – new simpler higher performing technology was deployed.
  • Enhanced security with Webroot – Webroot prevents staff from inadvertently visiting infected, inappropriate or fraudulent websites, which is the most common cause of malware infection.
  • PC replacement – Ageing end life workstations were replaced with new lower power consumption machines.

What’s next?

Reviewing and changing Data management and storage is the next big thing, as staff have become more familiar with using cloud based services and products.