Randstad is a Global Recruitment Firm with headquarters in the Netherlands and employs over 38,000 staff in 39 countries across the Globe. Randstad’s mission is “shaping the world of work” and they are passionate about matching the best people with the best companies in order to develop their potential.

Randstad has a Cloud First strategy. As part of this strategy Randstad was in the process of moving to Google Apps for all their office and collaboration applications. The Asia Pacific firm had already migrated all their on-premises infrastructure to the Amazon AWS Cloud Platform with traditional Windows File servers on Virtual Machines in AWS. End Users accessed files and some of their applications via Citrix Virtual Desktops. 

This had significant cost implications given the monthly compute and storage costs in AWS ,as well as significant annual Citrix and Microsoft licensing costs to keep this running and the management overhead of securing and protecting this data. In light of global Google Enterprise license agreement and the near Unlimited storage given to Google Enterprise clients in Google Drive the path forward was clear. 

An additional factor was the advent of COVID-19 with most staff working from home, it was inefficient to have staff all remote in to the Files via Citrix to AWS. Giving users secure access to an unlimited Google Drive in the Google Cloud is a far more efficient and cost effective solution.

There were several significant challenges associated with this migration including ; the secure transfer of data from AWS to Google and the Google API limiting data transfer rates. However the biggest challenge was the end user experience change required from accessing files in a traditional Windows File Server folder structure, to a more modern cloud experience of the File Sync and Share Google Drive.

Randstad engaged Cloud Solutions Group to help them to deliver this project.