Case Study

T.J. Morris

Sector
Retail
Services
Cloud Migration, GDPR Compliance
Solution
Cloud Hosting, Compliance and Data Management
Platform
Citrix Environment

T.J. Morris Ltd., trading as Home Bargains, is one of the UK’s fastest-growing retailers, combining the prices of a discount retailer with well-designed quality stores and fresh, friendly service. TJ Morris was established over 40 years ago by Tom Morris. Since opening his first store in Liverpool, Tom has grown the business organically to become one of the biggest privately-owned companies in the UK.

The company now boasts over 400 stores and employs more than 17,000 staff. It is the largest employer in the Merseyside region and is the largest independent grocer in the country.

Challenge

In order to sustain their company growth and ensure compliance with GDPR legislation, the T.J. Morris IT department were searching for a managed services partner who also specialised in IT security services. They were preparing for a data migration and cloud hosting project to update their overall IT infrastructure.

Some of their key requirements included:

Addressing fileserver security and creating a standard permission structure for all departments
Increased visibility, security and simpler management for all user sessions
Improving app update speeds, without the need to take their systems offline to complete updates
Enhancing their overall IT security strategy for user accounts, including monitoring file modifications and access

Solution

The T.J. Morris IT team met with technicians from SysGroup and decided to enlist their help after a competitive bidding process. SysGroup were able to build a timeline and thorough strategy to meet T.J. Morris’ unique requirements, as well as assemble a team to research and recommend the ideal configuration.

After building the new Citrix environment and migrating their users across SysGroup also worked very closely with T.J. Morris’ IT department to completely re-structure their fileserver data using a standardised permission structure for all departments.

The cloud hosting solution created for T.J. Morris included:

Virtual production environment & DR environment, including all licensing, AV requirements
Virtual Machine build with OS installation & patching
Site to site VPN setup
Citrix environment build
Data migration
Email mailbox creation & migration to new Exchange server
Installation of required applications to Citrix environment
Printer installation & mapping on Citrix
Configuration of Active Directory & Group Policy in line with T.J. Morris’ requirements.

Results

SysGroup were able to deliver a timely configuration and migration process and ongoing collaboration with the T.J. Morris IT department to improve their daily tasks and find the best solutions for any new requirements they identify.

As a result of the data migration to their new hosted environment, T.J. Morris experienced:

Superior monitoring across their entire IT environment
Streamlined process for updates to their 4CSQL app without downtime
Enhanced auditing and visibility for filesharing and user access, which helps them to achieve GDPR standards

Testimonial
We selected SysGroup as our new managed services partner due to its strength, understanding and ability to implement security measures that conform to the requirements of GDPR, as well as its extensive flexible approach to IT solutions.
Frank Christiansen
IT Director