He often travels abroad and is frequently out of the office inspecting properties or at exhibitions. I’ve been with him to a few antique carpet sales!
Like many business people we support, he could be anywhere in the world and needs access to:
• email
• calendar
• files
on-line, from his tablet, smartphone or any device without problems.
Up until 2012 his whole IT system was dependent on one computer in his office. Everything – email, access to documents, backup, virus checking and spam filtering was dependent on the server.
There were many times that things went wrong. Alex was frequently out of the office and email on his phone didn’t work, or he couldn’t access files from his laptop.
The worst situation was when email stopped working on Christmas Eve, 2011! The Exchange (email) server was failing and the main email database file was corrupted. Not only did this mean restoring from backup, a lot of down-time, disruption for his office, but also working through the night to get things up and running.
Fast-forward two years, at Carltone’s 2013 Christmas party Alex was telling us how happy he is with the computer system.
• No downtime for 18 months
• Staff working well on secure PCs
• Alex able to work confidently from his iPhone and iPad from any location
So what were the changes that transformed Carltone’s IT?
• Email on the Cloud using Microsoft Office 365
• Cloud Drive using Egnyte for all documents and images
• Backup all data on the server to a local drive AND to a cloud backup service
This is an example of hybrid Cloud, where important computing functions are now served from the Cloud but a central “on premise” file server is operating in the office on a LAN (Local Area Network).