Powering SaaS Resilience at Global Scale

The Access Group is a UK-headquartered global software provider delivering SaaS solutions across diverse industries including healthcare, government, accounting, payroll, and legal. With a focus on business productivity and digital transformation, Access serves thousands of customers globally, operating at scale through over 30,000 VMs and 100,000 databases. The company’s health and social care division supports essential services, including National Health Service (NHS) systems for patient records and operating room scheduling. As Access expands worldwide, it relies on Pure Storage to simplify complexity, ensure performance, and innovate for the future.

Access is a global business software company whose rapid growth—fueled largely by acquisitions—has introduced a host of infrastructure challenges. Each acquired company came with its own systems, platforms, and data management strategies. “It created a complex operation to run,” explains Rolf Krolke, Regional Technology Director. “The way that we delivered our services needed to be completely compliant and sovereign with all of the different regulations in different jurisdictions. We needed to standardize operations to meet the performance and compliance expectations of our customers.”

To bring order to the sprawl, Access turned to Pure Storage as its global Tier 1 storage platform provider. With FlashArray™ powering critical workloads and Pure1® providing real-time visibility, the team could finally see and control data assets across their environment. “We weren’t able to see before… now we can see everything connected to the storage,” says Krolke.

With more than 30,000 VMs in operation and growing, Access needed more than raw performance—it needed virtualization at scale, with minimal disruption. Pure Storage’s seamless integration with VMware has proven invaluable. “We manage our VMs directly through Pure1 or the VMware management console,” says Krolke. “That gives us the flexibility to see what is going on and move workloads wherever they need to run. Pure Storage gives us that peace of mind that we’ve got a rock-solid data platform to run on and integrates well with our virtualization layer.”

The Pure Storage platform supports a wide range of diverse applications acquired through M&A. “Some of these workloads struggled with performance on legacy storage,” says Krolke. “But we’ve found with Pure Storage that it can handle our diverse workloads—and we haven’t had to do any engineering work to make that happen.” This has freed the engineering team to focus on innovation, not infrastructure.

Pure Storage’s resilience isn’t just a convenience—it’s a necessity. In the UK, Access supports NHS organizations and other healthcare providers with mission-critical applications where downtime can be life-threatening. “These platforms can’t go down,” Krolke emphasizes. “Pure Storage gives us the confidence—in providing a highly available, stable, and secure platform—that the mission-critical health data will run without disruption,” he says. That reliability underpins everything they deliver and provides assurance to their customers that the data is safe.

As Access evolves from infrastructure modernization to digital transformation, Pure Storage is laying the foundation for its AI ambitions. “We’ve launched Access Evo, our AI platform, and we’re planning ahead—thinking about bringing AI close to the data to give customers higher performance and faster results,” says Krolke.

Access is actively exploring Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated (formerly Cloud Block Store) and deploying Pure Fusion™️ as part of the intelligent control plane for an Enterprise Data Cloud. “Everything used to start with compute,” Krolke says. “Now everything starts with data. The Enterprise Data Cloud is the evolution.” By centralizing storage and automating policy-based data orchestration across clouds, Access is preparing to deploy containerized, AI-ready services at scale.

Pure Storage’s role has grown far beyond a storage supplier. “Our relationship has evolved from vendor to strategic partner,” Krolke says. “Pure Storage is now involved in our product and engineering conversations, helping us shape our long-term vision.”

From performance to resilience, and from standardization to AI strategy, Pure Storage has helped Access build a future-ready platform. “We’re a curious company,” says Krolke. “Pure Storage is very curious as well. That’s why we work so well together.”