“Together with Triangle, we addressed key infrastructure and IT operations challenges that could have jeopardised ongoing efforts to modernise and scale the business. Before long, this service partnership helped turn our organisation into a leader in operational resilience. Our high-integrity infrastructure and resilient IT operations continue to provide a foundation for ongoing transformation and innovation.”
As one of Ireland’s largest food wholesalers, generating annual sales of over a billion in 2023, the company’s operational footprint grew significantly over the past couple of decades. As a result, its core infrastructure struggled to keep pace, prompting the company to invest in modernisation efforts that would upgrade and maintain the integrity of its IT environment.
The existing infrastructure was a mix of aged technologies spread across multiple, and sometimes unsuitable sites for a business of its size and uptime requirements. Without a coherent architecture and a resilient design, day-to-day operations management practices became unwieldy and untenable, leaving the business highly vulnerable to disruptions created by system failures or outages.
Following the successful resolution of a major incident at their main distribution facility, the client partnered with Triangle’s experts to plan and implement a new modernisation strategy that would lay a foundation. Not only for better technology, but also management practices and processes that would offer long-term adaptability and operational resilience.
Triangle began by auditing the existing IT infrastructure and operations environment, identifying critical risks to the resilience of the business. This assessment included an architecture roadmap and high-level design to address those needs, with a matching multi-year investment plan to achieve stability and scalability across the estate.
The initial project delivered a dual-site, highly available virtualised environment including new datacentre, network, compute, storage and monitoring technologies for critical services at the client’s distribution hub. Triangle then provided a 24x7 managed service for all technical operations at the facility, introducing consistent processes for monitoring, patching, incident, change and capacity management, and other essential IT operations.
Success at the hub paved the way for wider consolidation. Triangle migrated and standardised multiple Irish sites, modernised backup and recovery tooling, and won the tender to run end-to-end managed services across the client’s full IT estate. During this period, three major business acquisitions were made; with Triangle providing the necessary transition services to keep operations seamless as processes and technology changed. Each business was integrated into the new platform with minimal disruption, immediately benefiting from a major upgrade in IT capability, with enterprise-grade resilience and support.
As the risk profile of the core infrastructure and operating platforms diminished, attention was turned to a joint initiative to modernise the company’s workplace infrastructure to provide improved availability and capabilities for end-users. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Triangle were already in the process of virtualising the organisation’s desktop environments. This gave the wholesaler a head start in transitioning its operations to a remote-first approach during the height of the pandemic.
This transition to a virtual desktop environment, as well as Triangle’s redesign of the company’s core infrastructure and operations, soon faced a crucial test at its main distribution hub: as a critical supplier within Ireland’s Strategic Emergency Management (SEM) framework, the organisation quickly saw its production volume double. Triangle’s experts wrapped extra security features around the services supporting remote operations at scale, allowing many staff to securely work from home without any impact on their business activities or throughput. The implementation of a centrally managed virtual desktop platform also allowed those critical workers, particularly warehouse staff and warehouse management staff, to continue to work on-site and/or at the office as needed without a single disruptive IT related event affecting their increased productivity.
As the infrastructure platform modernised, so too did the client’s application estate. Triangle, now firmly engaged in IT operations, assisted their application teams and application vendors to securely move a number of on-premises applications to public cloud and SaaS which allowed for further consolidation of on-premises investments and leveraging of cloud services, whilst also maintaining the integrity of the core principle of resilient infrastructure and operations.
“We were originally called in to help with a major incident. Despite the initial complexity, the issue was resolved relatively quickly. And through that process we were able to confirm what was known to the client; that the company’s infrastructure was built from disparate systems and environments that required a modernised approach to architecture - one that would improve operational resilience and provide flexibility for future growth and change.”
Together with Triangle as a key IT partner, the company transformed its IT infrastructure and operations into an adaptive, high-integrity environment that continues to be enhanced and evolved – investing in the resilience needed to support business operations as they scale to meet market demands.
With an architecture engineered for uptime, their production estate now runs on a highly available, actively monitored platform that absorbs seasonal peaks and acquisition-driven growth without breaking stride. Automated observability, underpinned by 24 × 7 managed services from Triangle, gives the IT team real-time insight into performance, capacity and security, allowing issues to be resolved before they affect business users or customers. As a result, the main distribution hub has yet to suffer any significant outage resulting from a failure within its core infrastructure.
Security and recoverability have been elevated in tandem. A rigorous patching and incident-management regime, combined with modernised backup and disaster-recovery capabilities, safeguards data integrity even during disruptive events. By eliminating single points of failure and streamlining operational processes, the company can focus on strategic expansion, confident that its digital backbone will keep pace.
