Bryn Clark is the Head of Global IT for Tristel – a leading Infection Prevention that keeps hospital staff safe worldwide.
Tristel is growing fast. Beyond its UK HQ, it now has subsidiaries in Spain, Germany, the US, Australia, and Asia. Underpinning this global expansion are Bryn and his team who work around the clock to keep everything running smoothly.
As part of his ambitions to give Tristel the best technology possible, Bryn decided to upgrade the business to E5 licenses. However, soon it became clear that adopting the full Microsoft suite would also come with new complexity.
"Microsoft gives us a single vendor for everything, but that doesn’t mean it’s a single pane of glass.
Our team was jumping between so many different portals, some of which are very complex. Take Purview for example, you need a degree of expertise to use it, and even then, you sometimes wait hours to get your hands on the data.
None of this is to mention Microsoft’s constant updates. Just when you think you’ve mastered a portal, an update changes things and you’re back to a snail's pace again.
Our team is already so busy, we don’t have time to constantly re-learn how to use Microsoft 365."
This is a common pain for IT teams managing Microsoft 365. The constant re-learning and searching is frustrating, but it also takes crucial time away from IT teams.
However, for Byrn’s team, the pain was uniquely acute. Tristel not only manages Microsoft’s 18+ admin portals but also must reconcile these with on-premises Active Directory and Exchange. This made user management especially complex:
"Onboarding a hybrid user can take up to 3 hours of configuration. This of course doesn’t account for human errors which inevitably occur.
With our team so busy, it was hard for us to get around to offboarding users too. We would resort to disabling user accounts and then leave the proper offboarding work until we experienced a rare lull in the firefighting.
As a team we have high standards, so being put in this situation was painful for us."
The lack of visibility and reporting into Microsoft 365 not only slows you down day to day, but it can also sometimes wake you up in the night.
During our conversation, Bryn recalls being awoken to firefight an issue after midnight:
"We have as many Entra Apps as we have staff. The trouble is, without proper visibility, we had no way to see if secrets or certificates were expiring, meaning that it was becoming a regular occurrence for critical apps to suddenly go down.
One night sticks in my memory. I remember being woken at 1 am with calls from Australia where our staff were unable to process sales orders. It turned out a critical integration had gone down due an expired secret.
Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t have a report you can check before bed!"
For IT teams around the world, this will be a familiar story: When critical apps go down, you wake up! Fortunately, Bryn’s team now gets scheduled reports highlighting which apps have expiring secrets and certificates. Just one of CoreView’s capabilities that has helped Bryn and his colleagues get a bit more sleep.
"CoreView has tackled so many frustrations and long-winded manual processes. We are faster, we are more secure, but most of all we are happier. Being able to instantly report on issues, get users onboarded fast, and proactively fix problems feels fantastic."
After learning about CoreView’s Microsoft 365 Management capabilities, Bryn scheduled a demo and was instantly impressed.
Soon, Tristel has signed up:
Rolling CoreView out was seamless. It was quick to implement, very easy for anyone understand, and it was effortless for my whole team to pick up.
Of all the benefits CoreView has delivered to Tristel, none has had as much of an impact as the task automation:
CoreView has enabled us to a lot things, but the biggest impact has undoubtedly come from the task automation capabilities. We used it to build automated user onboarding and offboarding workflows that are saving us huge amounts of time every month.
It’s freed us up to do so much more for Tristel.
On a personal level, it’s allowed me to focus more on what I need to be doing. My management responsibilities, mentoring the team, security and compliance, I can finally invest more time into all of this, thanks to CoreView.
Tristel also have cyber insurance and are Cyber Essentials certified, both of which require them to maintain a baseline of security hygiene across their business. CoreView’s policy enforcement and governance capabilities have also been helpful here too:
CoreView’s been helping us with our security and our compliance obligations too. We need to be able to prove that MFA is enforced and that we aren’t using shared accounts. CoreView’s reporting, policy enforcement, and auto-remediations make the whole process so much easier.
We aren’t spending our time digging through portals, using excel, and powershell to try and get full visibility. We know we are compliant, and we know the moment we aren’t, CoreView is on it.
For Bryn this visibility extends beyond just security issues too. CoreView’s reporting shows him Entra Apps with secrets and certificates that are expiring so that he and his team can pro-actively address these before a crisis comes.
Tristel are being ambitious with their M365 deployment. They are using Defender to bolster security, Purview for auditing, Teams Phone for telephony, and starting to look at Copilot too.
Bryn talked through the impact that CoreView is having on their ability to roll these services out.
Using Teams Phone before CoreView was just hard work. We didn’t have visibility of our direct routing numbers and we were having to use PowerShell to keep everything working properly. CoreView’s automations and reporting make Teams Phone easy for us.
For copilot, having visibility into who's using it has been hugely helpful. And knowing our tenant is well governed gives us more confidence as we roll it out.
And for Purview, CoreView just makes it usable. I know anyone in my team can use CoreView’s audit logs and quickly figure out what's going on.
The team are also using CoreView to ensure they have full visibility of unused licenses, enabling them to drive down waste and save money.
Bryn is excited about CoreView’s new capabilities and is already looking at configuration backup, CIS configuration enforcement, and the upcoming access review release.
He’s also considering using CoreView’s delegation capabilities so that Tristel’s subsidiaries can resolve basic IT issues while he and his team get well deserved rest.
As we wrapped up, I asked for his advice for his peers running IT operations in other Microsoft 365 organizations:
"I would definitely recommend it.
CoreView has tackled so many frustrations and long-winded manual processes. We are faster, we are more secure, but most of all we are happier.
As an IT team we hold ourselves to exceptionally high standards, standards that we can finally deliver. Being able to instantly report on issues, get users onboarded fast, and pro-actively fix issues before they cause problems feels fantastic.
So, it's been a bit of a frustration killer.
Before CoreView, things could be slow. HR might call asking for a report on an individual, and suddenly I am spending 3 hours digging around in Purview. They don't like to wait for this sort of information, and I don’t want to spend so much time out of my day doing something that could be automated.
But now, with CoreView, I can just say: "Here's the information you need." That makes every interaction so much more positive.
The other side is visibility. Visibility is a massive thing. If you can improve that one thing, it impacts everything. Microsoft’s got so many portals that visibility becomes blurred.
With CoreView I have it all in one place. I can see everything that's going on. It's as simple as that."