“Lemos&Crane have provided practitioners and policy-makers with information for action on social problems since 1994. We work with professionals in social housing, local government, criminal justice agencies, schools and voluntary organisations as well as trusts and foundations.” – from their website
Early adopters of Cloud Computing, they have been using Hosted Email for over 7 years. This has been very successful and has allowed virtually uninterrupted email to their Office as well as mobiles and PCs outside the office. Other functions such as company calendars and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) are handled by other cloud providers.
Their File Server is backed up on the cloud daily to a recommended UK based company specialising in Server Backup. Reports are received daily and the service provides a complete Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) service.
Anti-virus function is also cloud based, allowing reporting and scanning to be accessed from anywhere without the need for direct links to the Office.
As they have a large membership of over 30,000, organisation and continual knowledge of the status of their members is vital. For this they have built a CRM database which is accessed on a private cloud server. Marketing functions are handled by an online email service which links to their CRM.
This is a great example of hybrid type computing where the local area network is using an “on premise” Server computer for file storage and access, print server and User Account Management, while major functions such as Email, Diaries, CRM and Anti-virus are Cloud based.