How hyperconvergence helped City firm JM Finn ditch its data centre and ride out the pandemic

The financial services company slashed its infrastructure footprint by two-thirds allowing it to close an expensive London data centre

In the years since he joined London-headquartered wealth management firm JM Finn, head of IT and CISO Jon Cosson has witnessed multiple waves of technological change.

"You know you're getting old when you walk into the computer museum in Bletchley Park and you see the ICL machines you used to work on in there," he laughed.

An early adopter of virtualisation technology, an innovation he introduced to JM Finn in 1999, and a recent PhD graduate in cyber security, he's continually watching out for technologies that can improve both efficiency and security.

The company makes very little use of public cloud, preferring over the years to manage its own private cloud infrastructure in data centres close to its offices.

Cosson was quick to see the potential of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) for reducing the firm's physical infrastructure footprint, as well as moving expenditure from capex to opex, making it an easier sell to the CFO.

"I realised very early on that hyperconverged was the way forward. We can take three different technologies and combine them into one and that makes it very cost-effective for the organisation," he said.

He credits the adoption of HCI as one of two fortunate and timely decisions that helped JM Finn ride out the pandemic, smoothly rolling out secure home working to all of its 350 staff, some of whom had substantial hardware and bandwidth requirements - such as traders who operate using eight screens.

"We'd worked with Nutanix over the past couple of years and we'd refreshed our infrastructure so we knew the solution was tried and tested," said Cosson.

Initially he was worried about how well a virtualised network would cope with the demands placed upon it, but so far it has performed without a hitch: "Nobody really noticed any difference. The performance was exceptional".

Having a solid platform to work on allowed the firm to set up 350 remote logins with all the security protections required of a regulated financial services firm within five days.

As well as being in a good place technologically, by a stroke of good fortune in 2019 the company had undertaken a ‘war room' scenario planning session - which included plans for a pandemic - so when the real thing hit eight months later, they were ready for it.

Which is not to say the transition to home working was straightforward, exactly. For a start many employees - including the eight-screen traders - lacked the proper equipment at home. Secondly, soft phones didn't transfer well to the home environment - "people just didn't like them". To kill two birds with one stone, the firm distributed physical IP phones with video capabilities along with the laptops and workstations, which proved a boon to support.

"That's been one of the biggest benefits to our users, because it really helps when you're setting up a home system".

A more strategic benefit of rationalising its infrastructure is that the company has been able to downsize its data centre footprint significantly. This process has continued during the pandemic, with equipment being removed from the costly London facilities allowing their eventual closure.

"When we were looking at offices we thought, do we really need to keep our data centre in London? This is really expensive real estate and it limits where we can relocate the office to and so a decision was made to move it," said Cosson.

Before the move to HCI this would have been impossible due to energy and space requirements, but with the City data centre now a third of the size that it was it, it suddenly became a viable option. The equipment is currently being moved out of the data centre to one of the firm's other offices, with machines in that office relocated to a third location on the south coast. The company plans to complete the entire move by early May.

"So now we've got two data centres within our buildings that we own, and we've got our own environment, and that was all made possible because of the downsizing. And the cost savings will be phenomenal," Cosson said. "By May this year, we will have all that located out of London, then we'll relocate our head office in September, with no data centre, just a comms room into our data centre."

Looking to the future, JM Finn plans to build more digital services on top of its HCI, building on the experience with rolling out remote working to improve the user experience for its clients - "20,000 high net worth individuals".

"They're going to want to use Zoom and they're going to want to use other video services, so we're going to develop a strategy around that. Of course, right at the heart of this strategy is security. What I see for the future is a more dynamic organisation using technology, but also ensuring that technology is protected."

Citing the biggest risks to the firm and its clients as coming from email, phishing and social engineering, Cosson said they'd be working with Nutanix to incorporate AI into the network in order to spot anomalies and filter out the noise.

"I've got a relatively small team, so I'm heavily reliant on solutions and technologies to streamline this," he said.

Don't miss Deskflix: Digital Workplace, coming in May!