VIRGIN TRAINS: BOX MIGRATION

Virgin Trains is a valued client of ours and has been for several years now. It is the shared vision to deliver a truly exceptional end-user experience that has now seen the adoption and successful roll-out of a shared cloud content platform.

With nearly 4,000 employees carrying 34.5 million passengers per year across the country, most of which have to be mobile, it’s important that they stay ahead of the curve in today’s world. With a head office located in London Euston and the main operations hub in Birmingham, the requirement for secure, easy access to their data and files is imperative to serving both their internal and external customers.

Prior to implementing Box with Spherica, Virgin Trains were using outdated technology which was negatively impacting the day-to-day IT user experience. After asking employees “what would make your everyday working life better?” it was clear that to increase productivity they needed to address file-sharing capabilities, improve scalability and adopt collaborative working.

Virgin Trains’ reliance on outdated technology meant all of its data was being stored on-premise across multiple file servers, causing users to have issues accessing files “on the go” through slow VPN connections.

They were also finding that file sharing, with both their internal and external customers, was proving to be a complex and difficult procedure. This was particularly difficult for their marketing and brand teams who often needed to share very large files and had little control over version management.

Further frustrations appeared with scalability and cybersecurity, and with the latest GDPR laws coming into effect at the time, Virgin Trains needed to ensure the safe handling of its data and storage within the EU, and preferably within the UK. It was clear that a streamlined, corporate solution needed to be found.

It was important for Virgin Trains to provide a solution that was easy to use and intuitive, and one that would allow its near 4,000 staff unrestricted access to files across a range of devices. As part of the planning process, Spherica needed to be sure the infrastructure was suitable to support a new cloud-based content sharing platform.

We integrated the Box platform giving Virgin Trains a cloud content management solution across the range of applications it uses daily, improving collaboration between teams both internally and externally.

It also improved cybersecurity through its native encryption and provided an EU data centre for GDPR compliance.

The migration process was simple, firstly a folder structure was constructed to be based on Virgin Trains’ input and using the Box Waterfall permission. Security permissions were configured based on group memberships synchronised from Azure AD. Integration with Azure AD was configured to provide Single Sign-On Access to the Box platform and then user provisioning was configured.

Easy file sharing and version management capabilities have been advantageous to Virgin Train employees, streamlining their productivity.

This is often seen in meetings where several people are able to work simultaneously on the same document. Francesca Bennett, senior brand designer, says that they use the system both internally and externally saves them 20 – 30 minutes at a time without sending links and splitting files manually. She said, “time is really precious to us, and if we get it back and it’s really streamlined it makes our lives a lot easier.”

Ultimately, the feedback we have received has been overwhelmingly positive, the intuitive nature of the platform means it has been integrated smoothly and easily adopted by all. As Virgin Trains is a truly mobile company, having access to all of their files across all of their devices has been nothing short of a game-changer to them and has been a clear and positive step along the digital transformation journey.