Leading the charge for IT at investment management company Nikko Asset Management, Marcus Rameke says that the global pandemic prompted an acceleration of digital transformation at his organisation.

In March 2021, Nikko AM signed an agreement to enter into a strategic partnership with Melbourne-based Yarra Capital Management (YCM), one of Australia’s leading independent fund managers specialising in Australian equity and fixed income strategies. 

During this period, Nikko also lost its Australian data centre, which was a shared hosting facility for its IT environment.

The New Zealand office had to relocate solutions that are used to enhance Nikko’s technology resilience and provide uninterrupted services to clients.

“At the same time this gave Nikko AM an opportunity to review and make some innovative changes to our New Zealand environment, already part of our global long term end user improvement roadmap as well as our sustainability efforts, however with this event these changes needed to be implemented much sooner,” says Rameke.

The team had to change the route of the company’s internal network and backup internet traffic securely within Nikko AM and externally with resilient solutions. The team implemented new local network links and made sure they had fully diverse links with failover to enhance the resilience with modern secure internet access moving forward. 

Another project was to relocate the New Zealand disaster recovery environment from Australia to Japan, to make sure that the whole production environment could be replicated to Nikko AM’s new disaster recovery site in Japan and be accessible.  “This ensures business continuity, a proactive way to ensure mission-critical operations proceed during a disruption if required,” says Rameke.

The mail hosting solution was migrated in the New Zealand office moving from an on-premises solution with a disaster recovery server environment in Australia to a cloud-based mail solution.  This has a separate cloud-based mail disaster recovery solution in place. “As with other cloud services, the advantages of adopting cloud emails are realised in reduced costs and increased operational efficiency, this change enabled us to use other collaboration tools as an added benefit,” says Rameke. 

During this time the team also migrated its users to a new terminal service in Japan, allowing the New Zealand office to embrace new ways to work remotely via a secure alternative to VPN. 

Working globally to meet local business requirements

During this huge period of change, Rameke credits the collaboration and teamwork of the global IT teams to deliver the digital transformation effort, providing uninterrupted service to clients and unwavering connectivity with colleagues.

“Despite the time zone, language, and location differences, we were all able to push forward little by little to achieve these tasks, and ultimately get to the finish line together. Members of the team all added different skill sets. Some had infrastructure expertise, while others contributed with cloud knowledge, and others were masters at logistics. There is no way one of us could have done this alone – this was not simply the moving of technology solutions from one location to another. It was much more than this. It came together through the dedication and commitment of our global team,” says Rameke.