Goal Group is a FinTech organisation and global leader in withholding tax reclamation and securities class action recovery services. It achieves this by delivering end-to-end claims, recovery and reporting solutions that combine legal and procedural expertise with proprietary, market-proven software.

Goal’s focus on innovation, combined with a long-standing managed service partnership with BJSS, has helped the organisation to accelerate its migration to the cloud.

“This migration was an integral and essential step in the evolution of our technology to support our growth strategy including developing new products to facilitate entry into new markets. It simply would not have been possible to successfully execute this strategy without our partners at BJSS.”

(Stephen Everard, CEO, Goal Group)

The Challenge

The FinTech industry in which Goal operates has become a hotbed for innovation and fierce competition. The market leaders are those with not just outstanding products and services but an IT infrastructure that is stable, agile, and affordable.

With an outstanding offering in place, Goal recognised the final piece in its success puzzle – its IT infrastructure. Since being founded over 30 years ago, the group had accrued a complex on-premise legacy estate in its London office that was responsible for the company’s IT operations globally. As time passed, the legacy infrastructure started to create several problems.

The infrastructure needed to be modernised quickly and properly. But Goal did not have the IT resources internally to modernise such a complex system. To tackle this issue, Goal approached our Managed Services team to take on its IT service. In the initial phase of the managed service, we stabilised Goal’s applications. The next phase would see most of Goal’s applications, data and services migrated away from its on-premise infrastructure and onto the cloud.

The Solution

Our aim from the outset was to deliver a modern managed IT service for Goal. A modern managed service is one that blends traditional ITIL service management with the latest software development techniques and cloud.  This would improve the company’s agility and stability, all while allowing the company to focus on its core operations.

Having already stabilised most of Goal’s legacy applications, we were in a position to start migrating them to the cloud.

To achieve this, we commenced the engagement with a short discovery phase to de-risk the project and develop an implementation roadmap.

We then focused on migrating the company’s applications, application data, and corporate data to the cloud. All of which were migrated to a minimum viable product (MVP) AWS cloud platform in a ‘big bang' approach. This was due to the legacy applications being written in a variety of languages and coupled together by different databases.

Benefits

Improved efficiency and agility

Goal is extremely committed to delivering world-class services to its clients. Before engaging BJSS, it was placing a significant amount of time and resource into managing its ageing infrastructure. Our managed service has taken this burden away from Goal, which can now focus entirely on delivering value for its clients. Its applications and data have been migrated to the cloud in a project that would not have been possible before working with BJSS. By operating entirely in the cloud, user experiences have been improved, and they can now securely access Goal applications and data remotely. Additionally, new cloud applications and services can be delivered with ease.

Significant cost savings

Our managed service has helped to generate significant cost savings for Goal. By decommissioning its legacy estate, it has saved a considerable amount of money in running and time costs. Our vast experience in cloud migrations and managed services ensured that the project was completed on time, within budget and to a high standard. We now support Goal’s cloud platform by managing its licences and continuously improving it in line with the company’s needs. We’ve also ensured that Goal can effectively manage its cloud costs with minimum effort required from its team.

Enhanced disaster recovery

Crucially, we’ve helped reduce Goal’s disaster recovery time from six weeks to just one day. The cloud migration has taken away the vulnerability associated with having on-premise legacy systems. All the company’s applications and data are stored securely in the cloud. They can be accessed from anywhere and at any time. Our managed service has given Goal’s clients real confidence that the company’s systems are robust, and they can expect minimal disruption to their services. As a result, Goal is winning more business than ever before and is continuing to expand its operations around the world.