Challenge.
Since academia launched in 2005 with language lessons from just five teaching rooms in Basel, the company has continued to grow to accommodate more offerings, locations, and employees. With every new member of the academia Group Switzerland AG, however, their IT needs to grow too. When the academia Group took over the Allegra schools in Zurich in 2018, and rebranded them as academia integration in 2019, their existing IT infrastructure was pushed to its limits. It was time to reposition their IT and make it future ready.
The foundation for the new IT needed to be a platform that every group company could be part of. This would enable new areas to be integrated more quickly and expand new on existing ones easily. academia wanted to have an external partner take on this area and operate basic infrastructure while still allowing the academia Group’s IT department lots of freedom in implementing their own projects. As the first project, academia and Discendo’s IT had to be merged and a joint ERP introduced for all companies of the academia Group Switzerland AG. Bechtle has just the right solution.
We use Youtube to embed video content on our website. This service may collect data on your activity. For more information, please go to the settings page.
Solution.
Together with the academia Group’s IT, Bechtle developed a highly-flexible and still heavily-standardised solution based on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Bechtle also integrated Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure AD Connect for academia in order that users could use just a single login. Moreover, academia uses on-premise solutions. For Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure with AD Connect, academia also uses solutions from the public cloud. In this way, the corporate group uses a real multi-cloud solution that is flexible, scalable, and also secure.
Migration of Discendo’s existing IT into academia’s new environment was a real challenge, however, as it didn’t just need to happen quickly, but tools developed by academia in the previous environment such as AD Script Tools needed to work in the new environment. And Bechtle also needed to securely merge the two companies’ WAN networks. In order to connect up the multiple company locations, Sunrise IP VPN was used as a cost-effective solution. This enabled permeant and reliable location networking where data is exchanged on the MPLS backbone (Multi Protocol Label Switching) from Business Sunrise—completely separate of the public internet. The corporation can now securely access all services from all locations while also enjoying high availability.
academia is constantly growing. Our IT needs to be able to keep pace. Thanks to Bechtle and our new multi-cloud solution, capacity bottlenecks such as with storage are now a thing of the past. We can provision all of the capacity we need from Bechtle—and it’s freely scalable. Our growth in terms of IT is now ensured.
Andreas Földényi, Konzernleitung, academia Group Switzerland AG
Business benefits.
With the new multi-cloud 360° infrastructure solution from Bechtle from the Swiss tier-4 data centre and its associated outsourcing of the Administration Desktop Interface, the academia group now uses a joint platform that’s at the cutting edge. All solutions operated on it are state of the art, and academia can provide, manage, and scale all services centrally. Capacity bottle necks such as in storage volume or other areas are now a thing of the past. All capacities are freely scalable with Bechtle and can be expanded any time and anywhere.
Partners.
