A modern way of working for Fairway Travel

Fairway International Travel are an independent travel agency specialising in providing travel for the professional golfers on the PGA European Tour, PGA European Senior Tour and European Challenge Tour. Based in West Yorkshire, Fairway International Travel have over 25 years of experience in the travel industry and are one of the UK’s largest golf travel specialists.

Their team of dedicated travel specialists are on hand 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to create bespoke travel solutions for the world’s golfing elite, making it imperative that they have an IT system in place which can facilitate this service.

Fairway International Travel recognised the need to upgrade and futureproof their IT servers and systems to keep files and data securely backed up. As a result, BCN Group was tasked by Fairway International Travel to explore replacement solutions.

BCN Group extensively assessed Fairway International Travel’s current IT servers and systems and researched possible solutions best suited for their business needs. We offered Fairway International Travel the opportunity to replace their current servers like for like on premise and offered a fully integrated cloud solution.

Fairway International Travel were already familiar with cloud platforms as they have been using Office 365 for around a year and so expressed interest in taking this path forward.

After making the choice of moving to the cloud platform, BCN Group undertook a project to move Fairway’s on-site servers to the cloud and host them on Microsoft Azure as Virtual Machines. The whole Microsoft application stack is available in the cloud.

Fairway International Travel has a single office, comprising of around 15 users with some remote workers connecting from outside of Europe, so connectivity to services must be fast and reliable for these users. The Azure platform’s global reach allows Fairway Travel to meet the needs of all its users, whatever their location, using only one platform.

BCN Group have extended Fairway Travel’s active directory into Microsoft Azure. This has allowed the migration of their Remote Desktop service environment and all file data onto the Azure platform. To take advantage of Azure’s extensive reach and toolset the remote desktop environment has been enhanced with an “Anywhere access” gateway.

This all means that Fairway International Travel can manage data more efficiently and, with the addition of Azure Backup, Fairway can take advantage of Microsoft’s 30+ data centres allowing resilient backups. They are therefore not only covered for an effective disaster recovery plan but have storage that meets their performance needs.

As a result of working with BCN Group, Fairway International Travel are now no longer dependent on any on premise hardware. This means they no longer have to worry about backing up any data on on-site servers.

The migration to the Azure environment has been a smooth and efficient process. Employees at Fairway International Travel are still using familiar applications and have not had to receive any additional training.

The Azure cloud-based platform also now makes it easier for remote users to access the Remote Desktop Gateway faster and more securely. Company data, email and applications are all now securely stored in the cloud without the need to invest in expensive hardware. Time and cost savings have been made as there is now less hardware to maintain freeing up more office space.

As Fairway International Travel continue to grow, BCN Group offer Fairway Travel the opportunity to increase specifications on their virtual machines and the cloud to ensure any new users can seamlessly integrate into the company’s working systems without causing any disruption. The Azure platform is scalable and can be easily ‘turned up’ or ‘turned down’ depending on demand.