-growing helium and natural gas producer, Renergen, has supported its growth spurt and enabled a seamless transition to hybrid work, using cloud-based managed services by LanDynamix.

Renergen has made headlines in the past year for its proven reserves of helium rising sevenfold at its Virginia gas plant and is well-placed to supply helium into a growing and constrained market. Helium is a rare element necessary for medical imaging, welding, fibre optics plus electronics, and  national defence. As Renergen grew its team to support the new plant in Virginia, the company found its cloud-based infrastructure enabled its scaling up.

LanDynamix Technology Adviser Ethan Searle says: “LanDynamix migrated Renergen off on-prem servers into the cloud with Microsoft 365 and Azure AD some years ago. As their staff count increased six-fold, the cloud solution allowed them to scale their compute needs quickly and seamlessly. It also meant that there was no money wasted on hardware that they would quickly outgrow. The company’s IP around its Virginia gas plant is also critically important, so all of our security best practices have been implemented to ensure this data is kept secure.”

Mandy Stuart, Head of Information Technology at Renergen Limited, says: “Our cloud-based computing strategy provided scalability and reproducibility, it made it easy to deploy resources and scale as our business grew and continues to do so. We don’t have a large IT headcount and being cloud-based allowed us to outsource to cloud computing providers, to free up our resources and focus on our key business objectives.” 

Stuart says the cloud infrastructure enabled a seamless switch to remote work during lockdown, and now supports the company’s hybrid work model. “We expected a huge increase in the number of support calls that were logged at the beginning of lockdown. But the need for support did not increase, and business continuity didn’t suffer.”

The company’s headcount has grown from around ten to over seventy across its Bompas Road head office and Virginia gas plant, making a hybrid work model necessary. “Being cloud-based works well for us in light of the increase in staff count – we simply would not have had space for all employees to be based in the office full-time,” she says. “The cloud-based system supported us as we grew. It also made adapting to lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic very easy.”