Cloud migration saves money for FX educator

As a global player in the FX trading training industry, Learn to Trades’s reputation thrives on their ability to innovate and adapt to market trends. To that end, the operations team in Learn to Trade was seeking a relevant, in-depth and effective professional advice to be able to reduce running costs, but keep agility and mobility.

Learn to Trade’s head of global finance has been tracking a growing hosting cost in their cloud server infrastructure. They have a traditional Microsoft server environment hosted in a private cloud, allowing an opex budgeting model with no worries for looking after hardware warranties or equipment.

“Our aim is to keep in the cloud, although our storage costs are rising, we know Tech Engine Australia could find a better solution for us”

But not only does Learn to Trade have a large workforce, it is also spread all over the world. Rosie McGurk is an Operations Manager at Learn to Trade UK. For her, it was clear that an online solution that is accessible through different devices was a good step forward, as well as reducing costs.

“Learn to Trade is a global organisation. In order to reach all of the teams within the different regions, what better way to do it than having one place where our staff can access their files. And it will be a consistent approach.”

Tech Engine Australia realised early on that Learn to Trade is a company that wants to set the pace, not just keep up with it. They didn’t just want a foundation to their cloud storage, they also wanted to train their staff to be up-to-date and current in their knowledge and skills, so they could anticipate what their customers would want.

“I had the greatest degree of confidence in the IT services team at Tech Engine Australia, both in terms of quality of delivery and their ability to deploy globally, which we could benefit from across all of our regions.”

Fortunately, Learn to Trade had Office 365 in use for the emails, already set up. Having Office 365 meant that their staff already knew the benefits of putting their files into Microsoft’s cloud, rather than a private cloud online. The next step was to find the right way, to provide the users with the tools they needed.

To get Learn to Trade started, Tech Engine Australia services team began by carefully picking data stores that were most relevant to Learn to Trade and their staff. They then agreed a timescale to upload the global file shares. Their staff could choose from files to work from when they then available in build Office 365 Sharepoint Online pages.

The Tech Engine Australia team then worked with Learn to Trade to integrate core sets of users, with volunteered project champions make it easy for their global workforce to sync Sharepoint Online sites together into Onedrive, wherever they were, and whenever it suited. The video-based learning content is now used by Learn to Trade staff all over the world to assist them in onboarding new staff when accessing core datastores.

A launch was also successfully supported by a range of contractors and freelancers needing to work alongside Learn to Trade to deliver work – from video editors to financial consultants. The move into Office 365 for file storage has been a brilliant move, the running cost of 1TB in a public or private cloud was starting to get expensive and distasteful, but the move into Microsoft’s Saas Office 365 solution reduced their cost almost to £0! They already had the licenses, and now they have no cost for a private cloud file share. Learn to Trade are beyond happy with this migration work.

“I found the relationship to be a really positive one. One that was constructive. It certainly felt to me that what I was saying about Learn to Trade’s needs and requirements in this space was being listened to,” concluded Head of Finance.