National Theatre begins cloud transformation

The National Theatre, one of the UK’s most prominent arts institutions, has chosen Navisite to help its continuing migration to the Cloud by handling the implementation and management of Microsoft Office 365®. 

  • Thursday, 16th March 2017 Posted 7 years ago in by Phil Alsop
After a thorough procurement process, Navisite was chosen ahead of several providers for its strong value proposition and its expertise as a managed service provider of Office 365®.
The implementation of Office 365® replaces the National Theatre’s on-premise Microsoft Exchange platform, which had capacity issues.  Migrating its Exchange system and Office software environment to the cloud enables the National Theatre to quickly scale email storage according to demand and ensure critical emails are delivered.
Microsoft Office 365® will also help the National Theatre enable better internal communication and collaboration with a new mobile toolset. A large proportion of the National Theatre staff are craftspeople, designers and technicians, with their work often removed from a traditional desktop PC environment, yet the National Theatre’s previous legacy solution was not suited for mobile. With more collaborative, mobile-friendly software environments and reliable email services, the organisation will be better able to improve employee engagement and unify a diverse workforce across departments.
Central to selecting Navisite was the ability to offer additional value by providing its expertise across both the implementation and long-term management of the environment. By partnering with Navisite for the management of its Office 365 solution, the National Theatre is able to rely on Navisite’s skills, resources and experience with the solution that they do not have in-house. Navisite was also able to offer the National Theatre Proofpointas part of the solution to meet the organisations business continuity needs.
Jon Cheyne, Director of Information Technology at the National Theatre said: “We wanted to take advantage of the fact that cloud computing now makes it possible to put data, servers and compute facilities off-premises, with someone else managing it. Implementing Office 365® is the next step in our cloud journey and will help shift the role of our in-house team from trying to keep up with and maintain technology, to actually operating and looking at how the benefits of the technology can be utilised.”
Sean McAvan, Managing Director, Navisite Europe said: “Navisite’s proven track record of implementing and managing Microsoft email systems for a range of organisations, means that we can leverage deep in-house expertise to build and migrate new Office 365® users. Working with a culturally and artistically important organisation like the National Theatre is simply a privilege; and we look forward to continue to support them as the organisation continues its journey to the Cloud.”