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Microsoft partner Harbour IT has moved Australian financial lender Pepper Money into the cloud as part of the company’s digital transformation efforts.
The Sydney-based company transitioned a significant portion of its workloads across to Microsoft Azure over the last two years.
The migration also saw Harbour IT, now part of Canon Business Services, move Pepper onto Office 365 and Microsoft’s collaboration tool Teams.
“Over the last two years, working with Microsoft partner Harbour IT, Pepper has transitioned a significant portion of its workloads across to Azure, with ongoing work of leveraging further platform capabilities,” said Pepper CIO Jeremy Francis.
Since its formation in 2000, Pepper has grown to 750 employees in Australia and New Zealand.
However, despite its established footprint, Francis said the company needed to “remain nimble and respond to customer needs and changing market conditions”.
As such, Harbour IT began moving Pepper onto Azure around two years ago, which was followed up with investments in data and analytics, building strong integration and application programming interface (API) frameworks and more recently artificial intelligence.
With Harbour IT managing the overall infrastructure, Pepper then began moving away from using other third party partners for its technology management and began creating its own proprietary applications on Azure.
“We wanted to take back control of our technology environment from a high reliance on third party providers, particularly in the areas whereas a business we want to differentiate using that technology,” Francis said.
That saw the IT team develop “Pepper-styled” solutions that brokers and customers use, with access to these applications streamlined by Azure Active Directory.
In addition, the deployment of Teams and Office365 has helped free employees up to interact more productively, with Francis adding: “I think some of the biggest wins have come from the increased interaction and collaboration across the organisation that we’ve had through the move to Office 365 and Teams.”
