Business backup and disaster recovery
Overview of the company
Established in 1947, this Accountancy Firm are one of the industry leading in Sussex. With over 65 years, they are an experienced practice, based in both Brighton and Rustington with clients throughout Sussex, the South East and London. Their practice is based on relationships developed through understanding and trust. They work by the motto “Good advice, simply given”. Read the case study below to see how we provide IT Support for Accountancy Firms.
THE PROBLEM
Prior to providing IT Support for Accountancy Firms, this customer used a physical server rather than online backups. If their physical server had become damaged or destroyed, the entire server would have had to be reinstalled from scratch and the data migrated back onto it. Both costly and time-consuming for the business, they could not afford this level of downtime and they needed a more robust backup system in which they could have full confidence.
We switched the business backups over to a virtualised server. A virtualised server allows the customer to restore all data onto any physical machine with the capabilities in the exact same state it was last left, meaning zero data loss and fast recovery. The solution significantly reduces customer downtime and data loss in the event of damage or disaster.
THE SOLUTION
When we first became the IT support provider for this customer, we upgraded their physical servers operating system so that it could handle a virtualised environment. Their old server was also a local exchange server. We fully migrated their emails onto Microsoft Office 365 for better functionality.
Each month we check the amount of data that each of our customers has backed up to our server, here in the office. Recently, we discovered an abnormality in the increase in the amount of data being backed up for this customer.
We notified them of this increase in size and asked if they would like us to investigate it for them. After we had a look into it, the data ended up being a variation of backups coming from all of their software on the server. We setup a brand new backup for software backups that only backs up to a local USB hard drive and not offsite to our servers, this significantly reduced their costs and kept their backups intact. IT Support for Accountancy Firms is vital as there is so much data dealt with day-to-day, if anything were to go wrong, they would need a reliable source to recover their data.
THE RESULTS
Server upgrade
After upgrading the physical servers operating system to incorporate a virtual environment it provided the company with better restore option, this is due to the ability to capture an entire virtual machines state and restore it identically to another machine with these capabilities.
Cloud storage
After migrating their emails to Microsoft Office 365 it meant that the users emails weren’t directly dependant on their physical server being online to have access to emails. Microsoft’s mail servers store emails in a cloud environment so users can access their emails a lot easier and again there’s no downtime if the server goes offline.
Money savings, time savings
As a result of these upgrades, we saved this Accountancy Firm both money and downtime in the long run. The abnormal increase in online backup storage for this customer was rectified swiftly before their front end systems even knew there was an issue and we still had an action plan to backup all data in one way or another for them.
Anywhere, anytime access means more remote working, allowing for reduced costs. On-site engineers are now able use their own device, minimising hardware costs