Our consultants get a kick out of helping businesses improve their IT. In this instance, Aaron, one of our Technical Consultants helped a Cambridge based charted surveyors migrate their on-premise solution into the cloud. In addition, they also needed to move out of their current office in three weeks. Thankfully Aaron wasn’t alone. One of our Managing Partners, Phil, was involved to lend a hand.
Aaron and Phil were excited to take on this challenge as they are not strangers to solving problems. Phil says ‘The profits are a side effect of what we do. Our focus is on customer service and helping others.’ Therefore, with that in mind they both met this well-established local chartered surveyor to find out how they can be of assistance.
The first meeting went very well. We had discovered that we were recommended to them with the comment ‘The only company that might be able to help you in this difficult position is Cambridge Support’.
The charted surveyors said, ‘We need a new IT services company to look after our day to day IT needs as we have been let down. We need you to start looking after us immediately. They continued saying that ‘our servers, routers and network switches were rented from our old IT support company, and they will be removing them from our premises at the end of the month. We have just three weeks to deal with this. Plus, just to make it a little more complex, we are moving offices during the week before month end’.
Cambridge Support was contacted by these surveyors on the 10th of the month and essentially had three weeks to help them. After listening to the clients’ situations, they had experienced, before the meeting had even finished, Aaron and Phil already knew what was needed.
The Solution
Without wasting any time, Phil carried out a fact-finding site visit immediately. This was followed up the next day by Aaron carrying out a more in-depth investigation gaining a good understanding of the setup. Their setup was made of:
- On-premise Windows server with any virtualization
- Microsoft 365 tenancy used for only emails
- Various industry specific applications which were all cloud based
- A large amount of historic data on the local server
Phil has decades of experience in IT, helping business in the medical sector, creative companies, financial companies and even charities. So, he has a lot of varied experience to draw on and knew we had to act fast. Within just three days of initial contact, we took over the responsibility of managing the existing setup, plus with a rapid plan to migrate them to the cloud prior to the office move.
Helping with the move, Aaron describes the reasoning behind the cloud migration were, ‘Based on their needs and systems. They already had a Microsoft 365 platform and were paying for it, but not utilizing it. Therefore, this was more than adequate for their needs. The migration to the cloud eliminated the need for purchasing a replacement on-premise server. The cloud solution gave them additional flexibility and a simpler method of home/remote working. The best thing was that the new solution irradicated the complexity of the office move!’.
The Outcome
The clients new cloud environment included:
- Workstations/laptops as part of a new Microsoft Azure domain
- Emails operating smoothly
- All data migrated to SharePoint with SharePoint security groups in-place to manage user access
- Third party applications configured to operate with the new solution
- Microsoft 365 backup implemented
Therefore, Aaron comments, ‘In addition to the above, Cambridge Support reviewed and completed the structured cabling at the customers new offices and then implemented a new router and Wi-Fi access points. We were confident we could meet their needs within the short timeframe given’.
This solution essentially allowed the client to move offices without any IT support assistance. This was an amazing result achieved in less than three weeks, of which the client was very grateful for. Their benefits included:
- Over 50% reduction in IT costs
- Access to our support team from 7:00am to 7:00pm
- The ability to work from home without any additional complication to the way they work
- And an office manager with one less thing to worry about!
The cherry on the cake was the client’s response to all the work that had been carried out. They said, ‘we love the way Cambridge Support work and would recommend them to anyone’.
If your company feels migrating to the cloud is what you need or you have an office move; don’t worry, we will be able to help you. Just get in touch today at ask@cambridgesupport.com