Up until 2015, RGB Staffing operated a central data centre in Belgium for its European branches. It became clear to the IT team it would never be able to keep up with future performance and capacity demands, plus maintenance and operating costs for the ageing infrastructure were simply becoming unaffordable. Once the strategic decision had been made to decommission the data centre, Olaf Kropp had his team began planning their new IT infrastructure setup.

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RGF Staffing Germany offers services ranging from temporary staffing, permanent placements, tailored HR solutions and concepts plus consulting on HR core processes. It is a subsidiary of the Japanese-based Recruit Group, one of the world’s leading HR service providers which, among other things, operates the employment website ‘indeed’. RGF Staffing Germany has close to 500 employees across several locations in Germany.

The company’s brands include Unique Personalservice, Unique Medicum, Unique Professionals, Unique Students, Unique Doctors, Unique Pädagogik, Unique IT-now, Unique Engineering, Technicum, HR Solutions Advisors and staplerfahrer.de.

The new IT infrastructure should allow flexibility in deciding whether resources be run on-premise or in the cloud based on costs and technical requirements. Whatever the choice, however, compliance with current security standards must be a given. RGF Staffing shared their needs with several IT service providers with one very important condition, as Olaf Kropp explains: “As an SME, we need to work with someone on a level playing field.”

The Bechtle Virtual Private Cloud—hosted in the Bechtle data centres in Frankfurt am Main and Rüsselsheim—was determined to be the best tool for the job. RGF also decided to entrust Bechtle with the deployment and operation of the new server infrastructure, which included the structured migration of data from the central data centre into the cloud.

Step into the hybrid cloud.

The Bechtle Virtual private Cloud was the first step on the path towards the cloud transformation for RGF Staffing, but as the spring of 2020 brought the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and saw employees being forced to work from home from one day to the next, Microsoft Teams became an extremely important tool. However, the tool’s full potential can only be realised when used in combination with Exchange Online and the software procured ‘as a Service’ from the public cloud.

No sooner said than done, RGF Staffing and Bechtle migrated any relevant data from the Virtual Private Cloud to Exchange Online taking the first big step towards a hybrid cloud. In a strategic step, Bechtle took over the running of the Exchange Online environment, firstly to relieve the burden on Olaf Kropp and the IT team, but also to allow them to focus on creating more value for the company. This Bechtle managed service includes the backup and recovery of Exchange Online, OneDrive and SharePoint Online; cybersecurity, admin support and a proactive change advisory service.

This setup also paves the way for the flexible decision-making the company sought. The IT team are now in a position to launch new brands within days. “That just wouldn’t be possible with a purely on-premise infrastructure,” explains Olaf Kropp.

So, what’s next?

RGF Staffing Germany’s cloud journey doesn’t end with this new hybrid cloud set up. Olaf Kropp: “After seven years, all paths very clearly lead to the cloud.” The flexibility and speed are what stand out the most, but it’s also important for the team to be able to choose the best of both worlds. That means they can decide if an application is better placed in the Bechtle Virtual Private Cloud or a public cloud, giving them considerably more room for manoeuvre and allowing the team to respond quickly to changing business requirements.