Solid secure and scalable IT infrastructure for further acquisitions 

Detailed Case study

The Challenge

Growth is the cornerstone of success in business. Yet with growth comes complexity—particularly when it involves the acquisition of other businesses whose systems and processes may not align with your own.  

This was the case for StorHub, a self-storage success story that has grown rapidly over recent years. Starting out in Singapore, StorHub’s iconic orange-and-blue storage facilities are now visible in cities across the Asia Pacific. And, with the goal of becoming the world’s largest storage company, future growth is a given. 

As the StorHub technology team quickly realised, though, every acquisition brought IT baggage with it. Different countries were using different apps and tools—there was a lot of legacy technology, and varying levels of documentation about IT infrastructure. Syncing of files between teams and countries was nigh on impossible.   

This lack of interoperability led to costly delays and inefficiencies when trying to locate up-to-date financial and company data. It also meant StorHub was paying too much for software licenses and infrastructure that teams weren’t using. Not to mention the significant security risks with so many disparate systems in play.  

The Solution

With security in the forefront of their planning StorHub’s technology team had a larger scale to tackle and needed to evolve its approach. Realising the urgent need to better manage infrastructure and the operating environment as they continued to scale up, the team reached out to CNS to iteratively standardise different components of their IT stack. 

The first task was to migrate and consolidate multiple different mail servers onto Microsoft. This was no small feat—particularly in Japan, where the local team was using a bespoke, proprietary system that required a lot of manual work to migrate.  

Following email, CNS audited all of StorHub’s hardware to identify any outdated machines that needed updating or replacing. Then, Microsoft Intune was deployed to centralise management and give IT admins easy visibility into all machines, so that any future issues around unsupported or outdated infrastructure could easily be resolved.  

And, for employees, Microsoft OneDrive and Teams were deployed to centralise document management and storage, and enable the synchronous sharing and collaboration of work files. As an added bonus, it meant StorHub could terminate its costly Dropbox licenses.