High-performance forensics cloud for FRP Advisory

The Client

FRP Advisory are one of the UK’s largest business advisory consultancies. They provide forensic, debt advisory and corporate finance services to enterprises going through strategic change.

Ekco work with several key players in the insolvency industry, supporting their ongoing technology adoption and switch to cloud-based IT. In the main, it’s not an industry known for its technology uptake. However, those firms who took this seriously were well set to weather the uncertainty caused by lockdown in early 2020.

Many firms were caught out, reliant on on-premise infrastructure and physical office spaces. This simply wasn’t a challenge for FRP, who have been supported by our compliant cloud solutions for over five years.

The Brief

FRP are constantly ingesting infrastructure to host while advisory services are carried out. This makes their requirements unique: they need a high-performance platform that’s capable of running any workload, despite how old or non-standard the ingested environment might be. They need a platform they can count on with additional resource ready and waiting, should they need it at any point during an advisory engagement.

The Solution

With this in mind, Ekco provided a private cloud solution within memory compute on VMware with guaranteed read write IO performance. FRP are now completing batch processes in two hours that had previously taken over a day. This solution is simply not available in the market without buying, building and maintaining their own dedicated hardware.

Building a powerful cloud platform to run analysis on sensitive data

Utilising Ekco’s private cloud platform gives FRP the peace of mind that applications can be deployed quickly and easily to meet client demand. It’s imperative their cloud infrastructure is robust and reliable, whatever challenges client technology throws their way.

Adding to this, the forensic analysis that FRP carry out for clients requires high-performance storage for maximum IO performance. Because of the sensitivity of the data, the IO required and the costs associated when running resource-heavy operations, traditional public cloud platforms weren’t an option for FRP.

The Impact

Prior to working with Ekco, hosting projects would stack up alongside ongoing client support, which meant FRP often relied on expensive freelance expertise to deliver projects. To move away from this, and save the business money, they handed over all infrastructure to Ekco, freeing their team up to focus on revenue generating client projects by offloading support.

FRP also benefit from having Ekco’s experts on-hand, providing the insights needed to help drive projects forward. This provides support for FRP across cloud strategy, internal IT requirements and also client projects, in which Ekco are able to offer their expertise to ensure the best solution is realised for all parties involved.

At Ekco, we believe that the better we get to know a company, its goals, how they operate and what they require from infrastructure, we are able to offer far more value than hosting alone or helping with a one-off project. Our work over the years with FRP is testament to this, and is just one of many partnerships that allow us to ensure the cloud is working its hardest for our clients.

Client speaks

“Ekco’s private cloud solution gives us the flexibility to rapidly evolve and overcome our business challenges. Their technical expertise and ability to deliver solutions on time and exceeding expectations is the key reason we work with them. They offer a huge amount of value that we can pass on to our clients.”

– Steven Jones, IT Director, FRP