“Our former IT issues have been resolved by Venom and we now receive a great service from a local and very effective partner”
Andy Alcock
Operations Director
The Customer
Founded in 2015, Future Directions is a values based high quality social care provider. They drive a personalised agenda so that each individual who they support has their own support package to meet their individual support needs. They currently provide services across the North West and plan to expand further.
The Challenge
Future Directions carry out a mulititude of important operations which sees them working with vunerable people. Therefore, data security and data protection is of paramount importance to them. With Future Directions being a large CIC (Community Interest Company).
They were utilising the Cloud through hosted desktops provided by another provider but were unhappy with the level of service they were receiving. They were experiencing multiple issues such as regular downtime, often on weekly basis, improper data segregation and high response times to support requests.
Future Directions have around 190 computer users in total. They were regularly experiencing downtime each and every week, which simply wasn’t acceptable. In order to rectify these issues they decided to switch providers and took their intended works to tender, ultimately won by Venom IT.
The Solution
Future Directions requested 190 hosted desktops to be created on mixed platforms (Citrix & RDP), on a like-for-like basis. They also requested the creation of a large number of mailboxes, fully hosted and on site support their 190 staff members as well as extra off site backup, all of which Venom IT was more than happy to provide. Venom IT had to migrate all the users across onto our Cloud infrastructure and set up new Microsoft Exchange mailboxes as well as migrating the existing users mailboxes onto the new platform.
During the migration period our Microsoft & PRINCE2 certified project mangers detected and highlighted physical vulnerabilities within Future Directions existing local infrastructure which prompted Venom IT to recommend that Future Directions should look at replacing their existing firewalls with new state-of-the-art firewalls that are more suitable for their purpose. Future Directions having listened to and heeded this advice, decided to purchase new firewalls from Venom IT who then installed and configured them. This has resulted in less than 99.99% local downtime since the firewalls were replaced.
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