Sponda gains competitive advantage from digital transformation.
Embracing a truly cloud-first transformation, the way it should be done.
Agility.
Increased customer satisfaction, retention and operating speeds by streamlining every single operation.
Cyber posture.
Improved Sponda’s cyber posture with infallible, constantly monitored, fully backed-up systems.
Transparency.
Ensured that every system, every connection and every integration is logged, monitored and accounted for.
Cost Savings.
Sponda has saved significant time, resources (and therefore costs) and will do so long into the future.
Transformation Goals.
Sponda, a company owned by funds managed by Blackstone, owns, leases and develops office, commercial and retail premises in the biggest cities and growth hubs in Finland.
- Its transformation goals are tied into simplification of the business structure, more focused property ownership and profitable growth.
- The company’s professional investment platform delivers a premium customer experience, tailormade client solutions, active asset management, and property sales & acquisitions.
- As a market leader, it places great value on setting a good example when it comes to sustainability, which is why maintaining a balance between economic growth, environmental care and social wellbeing forms a key cornerstone of its operations.
For us, it’s crucial to have trustworthy partners to work with and execute strategic projects. With Microsoft we have a very long-standing relationship that has worked great. And we’ve been working with Nordcloud since 2019, and it’s been a very good cooperation.
Challenges.
Sponda is unafraid to break new ground and occupy new space in the commercial real estate market.
But as recently as a few years ago, despite its rapid growth, expansion, positive reputation and market dominance, it felt it was being held back by the limitations of its on-site data centres.
- Classic on-site data centres posed a security risk in the face of increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, not to mention back-up concerns, network and server upgrade issues, unnecessary costs, delays and bottlenecks.
- Sponda wanted to lead from the front: where others delayed their cloud transformation decisions, Sponda was decisive and chose Microsoft Azure as a clear favoured cloud platform.
- Sponda wanted cost-savings, but also recognised that the cloud’s transformational capabilities could bring significant agility and transparency for both itself and its stakeholders.
- This meant leading in both performance and innovation, as well as security and profitability. Sponda wanted the whole transformation completed with as little risk and downtime as possible.
We knew from the beginning we would go with Microsoft Azure as the leading player in cloud developments. Nordcloud became a clear choice as our preferred pure cloud partner; the skill of their experts, their cloud native skillset and proactive customer approach.
Strategy.
De-risk the process
This all came down to planning – there was considerable time, care and attention taken to meticulously plan the entire transformation. Nordcloud had frameworks in place that adhered to Microsoft best-practices from the moment of inception.
Assess and address
Through a series of assessments and workshops, Nordcloud reviewed Sponda’s processes – both internally and stakeholder facing – with a view to streamlining, improving and speeding up its offering.
Establish cost efficiencies
In order to grow as a business Sponda wanted to be as efficient, streamlined, and mindful of the bottom-line as possible. Which, when it comes to cloud transformation and migration, is not always a given, and required focused thinking from Nordcloud.
The right approach for long-term success – setting a strategy to last long past the initial programme
Speaking the same language
There has never been friction between Sponda and Nordcloud, both on a company-wide and individual-to-individual level. The two companies ‘speak the same language’ – together the two companies have established a straightforward, direct, collaborative way of working that suits Sponda’s operations perfectly.
Ease of partnership
Nordcloud meets regularly with various Sponda teams to make sure it’s constantly monitoring and improving existing solutions and applications. And beyond that, Nordcloud also reviews Sponda’s position in relation to the wider landscape on a daily basis, and thinks ahead on its behalf.
This offers a strategic, future-proof view that fuels innovation and furthers the business as a whole. Nordcloud is proactive in bringing answers to the table before Sponda has even asked the questions.
Contracts
Huge, unwieldy contracts – and all their related procurement processes, hold-ups and bottlenecks – are never part of the process. Contracts are agreed, raised, renewed and fulfilled with both speed and efficiency.
Speed of delivery
Nordcloud advises on all matters relating to internal systems, servers and third party solutions, to enable Sponda to respond, deliver and perform in as short a time as possible.
This frequently means queries are raised, fixed and resolved within a day.
Setting the foundations for success.
And we were able to achieve all the benefits Sponda was looking for: scalability, reliability, cost savings and accelerated innovation.
Migration
The learnings from a pre-migrated test environment, alongside an incredibly meticulous planning process, combined to deliver a risk-free production migration.
Nordcloud was able to bring efficient, environmental parity to Sponda’s operations, thanks to its agile, cloud-native approach. The migration was both efficient and cost-effective, and created a development environment comparable to a QA or test environment.
Landing zone
Sponda’s foundation landing zone serves as the network for enterprise workloads. As such it is secure, compliant and inherently modular – and is designed with both further growth and scalability in mind.
Connecting governance and delivery
Nordcloud and Sponda combined a traditional Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) and the organization wide architecture forum Technical Design Authority (TDA) into a single forum, which both streamlines and optimises operations. This is something that elevated the role of cloud-first in the organisation, which helped to push all services to the cloud quickly and efficiently.
Nordcloud both consults and advises on how future growth (for example) should align with – and will impact – the platform, and how it can best be optimised in advance to accommodate this.
The technical team meets to discuss everything from infrastructure and data to business and security, every week. This is a crucial cross-company peer check for the technical team’s work.
Data platform
Nordcloud developed the Sponda platform with the aim of streamlining and optimising its operations.
And with this aim constantly front-of-mind for Nordcloud’s engineers, the platform remains under constant development. This is all done without any effect on its speed or operability.
Continued support through the cloud journey.
Daily development work
Nordcloud’s infrastructure reports are regular and detailed, but form the merest tip of the iceberg in terms of the work that goes into maintaining, managing, securing and optimising Sponda’s processes on a daily basis.
As part of this ongoing process, development is absolutely key. Sponda is not only ahead of peers today, but is also prepared for new tech and security needs.
Managed services
The FinOps work all falls under Nordcloud’s managed cloud services offering, as does Sponda’s VPN, as well as the ongoing infrastructure reports generated by its performance.
These managed services make it easier for Sponda to acquire advanced technologies and security processes – as well as develop its own environments and applications – while giving it the ability to manage an often complex security posture.
Security
As part of the CCOE, Nordcloud is part of Sponda’s security incident response team, so Sponda’s systems are constantly under development (and refinement where it is deemed necessary) to both meet and pre-empt threats.
This means patching, updates and back-ups happen automatically (though are also monitored) 24/7, 365 days a year.
Cost optimisation
Nordcloud’s FinOps team provided a combination of tailored and out-of-the-box solutions according to Sponda’s unique requirements, to not only streamline and optimise its operations today, but also tomorrow.
Nordcloud analysed the costs over time and put together a report, before devising the perfect solution, which it then implemented and now manages, factoring in cost optimisation at every stage of the journey.
Key Results.
Nordcloud’s approach to cloud strategy is unique and we are highly impressed on how well that has worked and we believe that is the secret sauce to our cloud partnership.
Agile efficiency
Sponda has been able to significantly improve the predicted timelines and trajectory of its projects. Any internal network or server adjustments – no matter how large or significant – now take just days, rather than weeks.
In customer-facing terms, Sponda not only has quicker response times, it’s able to provide new solutions much faster.
Security & compliance
When it comes to both security and compliance, Sponda is held up as a benchmark. It now has watertight, constantly monitored disaster recovery plans in place for every single system. If it were to experience outages, there would be no threat to its data or security, and nothing would be lost.
With this high level of assurance, it is able to both operate with confidence and pass this confidence on to its clients – which in a market as hard-fought as real estate, provides a key competitive advantage.
Sponda is audited regularly, and while the systems Nordcloud has established and manages would stand up to any degree of scrutiny, the fact that they’re in place makes the compliance process both significantly easier and more efficient.
Transparency
When Sponda was using an on-site data centre, there was a risk of connections and integrations being missed.
There are now absolutely no additional integrations or additional connections between Sponda’s servers and infrastructure whatsoever that they aren’t fully aware of.
Cost visibility
Sponda can see exactly how much data centre capacity it’s using in live terms, 24/7, 365 days a year. Which means it is always in a position to take a view on where it would be prudent to streamline or optimise costs.
Status
Sponda has dramatically improved its status within the Blackstone Group and the wider real estate market. And it credits this status elevation to the work, improvements and continued development brought about by this cloud transformation with Microsoft and Nordcloud.
Sponda’s Digital Transformation Journey.
Project summary.
Future-ready.
Sponda’s data hub, as well as its business intelligence, both of which used to be an on-site solution, have received significant investment – in both time and financial terms – and as such its current data capabilities are basically unmatched, both within its portfolio and beyond.
Its BI platform now runs fully on top of the cloud, using Microsoft Azure components – and it is able to leverage this fully when making any strategic decisions.
With the most advanced tools available at its disposal, Sponda is now in the best possible position to stay ahead of its peers, its market and its competitors in the use of data and AI.
Mervi Airaksinen
Managing Director, Microsoft Finland
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