System integrator Trustmarque has announced it will continue it work with Natural Resources Wales, focusing on disaster recovery, and application and infrastructure support.

The agreement, which has now been in place for two years, was initially launched to help Natural Resources Wales simplify its IT estate following the merger of the three different bodies. Natural Resources Wales was brought about through the merger of Countryside Council for Wales, Environment Agency Wales, and the Forestry Commission Wales, all of which operated on different ERP systems.

“The creation of Natural Resources Wales resulted in a complex and disparate IT estate, and over the past two years Trustmarque has helped us effectively simplify it,” said Paul Subacchi, Head of Business Support Services at Natural Resources Wales. “Our ERP system is absolutely critical to the organisation, enabling us to become more efficient and offer greater self-service functionality to our employees.  Cloud is a significant part of our IT strategy, so we need a platform that is available, resilient, flexible and secure to deliver our ERP system.”

Initially projects focused on consolidating all ERP systems it was using for finance and HR onto a single platform, delivered through a combination of cloud, on premise and managed services. Trustmarque will now deliver Natural Resources Wales’ sole ERP system as a private cloud service, as well as creating a self-service portal, MyNRW, for the organizations 2000 employees.

Security was an important consideration for Natural Resources Wales, as Trustmarque has to continually demonstrate that it meets minimum security requirements set forward by G-Cloud. The requirements range from encryption to protect consumer data transiting networks, Trustmarque staff security screening and consumer separation, as well as ensuring that its own supply chain meets the same standards.

“The work we have done with NRW throughout our collaboration is testament to Trustmarque’s end-to-end IT service capabilities and our expertise in delivering cloud services,” said Mike Henson, Cloud and Managed Services Director at Trustmarque. “By selecting the Trustmarque Cloud, Natural Resources Wales is now able to realise the benefits of its Unit 4 ERP system via a secure and robust platform.

“We’ve also removed the potential ‘headache’ that software licensing can cause, allowing Natural Resources Wales to focus on its core business without any compliance concerns. We see our continuing partnership with Natural Resources Wales as an important and valuable digital transformation programme, and look forward to our future work together.”