Finance industry
SCOPE OF WORKS
The client is a firm of chartered accountants and business advisers in Surrey, providing a suite of professional services to businesses and individuals. In 2013, the business contracted Coubari to design their IT strategy and planned responses to future challenges, a role Coubari continues to fulfil as we look to drive further value with the use of the latest Microsoft Cloud technologies.
ROLE
As the sole contractor, Coubari fulfilled the role of a fully cloud managed IT services provider.
KEY CHALLENGES
The client’s existing infrastructure comprised on-premises servers and many locally-hosted applications. The server estate did not deliver the levels of performance and reliability required by the business. The company was reluctant to make a significant investment in an on-premises replacement yielding only marginal improvements.
The IT infrastructure includes several business-critical financial applications requiring regular updates to ensure compliance and security requirements are met. The business also has a mobile workforce requiring high speed, anywhere, secure access to data and systems. The company’s security policy requires that no data are stored locally on end-user devices.
KEY WINS
To provide secure, seamless access to data and systems from any location, Coubari introduced a cloud- hosted virtual desktop environment using Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop services.
All the company’s applications and the supporting server estate was migrated to the cloud, eliminating the costs associated with procuring and operating on-premises servers, improved the security posture, and provided dynamic expansion capabilities.
Supporting the business continuity arrangements, Coubari introduced a new disaster recovery solution using cloud-based replication technologies with snapshots taken of the system multiple times a day and offsite backup using Veeam services to provide an additional layer of resilience and recovery option.
To deliver a consistent, high-performance user experience Coubari also introduced Microsoft’s Virtual Desktop load balancing technology, which monitors the performance of the Windows Virtual Desktops, automatically routing users to make best use of server resources. It was key to ensure optimum utilisation provided a consistently high-quality user desktop experience while reducing overall cost through sharing and maximising the utilisation of the available resources.
INNOVATION
We audited the whole IT infrastructure and assets, set an IT strategy, and began modernising all aspects of the IT solution.
Owing to Coubari’s strategic approach to new technologies and offsetting anticipated challenges, the business had already been working with a remote setup for many years when competitors struggled to adjust to the Covid pandemic just a year ago.