Case Study: Laing O'Rourke

Building cities in the cloud

Published May 2019

casestudy_laingorourke

A leading construction and engineering enterprise, Laing O’Rourke brings innovation and excellence to the sector through its digital and offsite manufacturing approach. It is an international organisation with operations in the UK, Australia, Canada, UAE and Hong Kong. Its project portfolio in the UK boasts projects such as London’s Heathrow Terminals 2 and 5, Crossrail stations and is currently on site delivering the main civils package for Hinkley Point C new nuclear. The company currently has a portfolio of 50 live construction projects across the UK and is headquartered in Dartford, Kent with a number of regional offices and manufacturing hubs throughout the country.

The company’s IT infrastructure consists of three data centres, which are 85% virtualised using VMware’s vSphere and Microsoft’s Hyper-V platforms. It has 350TB of active data, various application data sets including Exchange, databases and web apps, and large unstructured file data.

Traditionally, Laing O’Rourke had to manage the physical transportation and archiving of data from more than 90 remote locations back to its centralised data centres. The data then had to be stored and be accessible for a period of time before finally being archived. The process was outdated, laborious, prone to delays, inefficient and vulnerable to human error and oversight.

By implementing Commvault and eliminating the need for tape backup, Laing O’Rourke had laid the foundation for a wider strategy to move backup to the cloud.