IT System Installation
Case Study
The Challenge
A local growing business came to us as their current IT System & procedures in place wasn’t sufficient to cope with the new demands of a bigger team. They were also aware there was minimal IT security in place and wanted this to be reviewed as part of the process along with the whole network infrasture.
Another major concern for the client was the current backup situation, they had backups running but we found a key database had been failing for months, so we took an immediate full backup offsite and this was to be addresses along the process along with the employee’s PC backups. When we spoke with the employees they also mentioned about the file share going down on a regular basis
Key Points
• The current setup had every user sharing accounts with admin access
• Backups had not been working on any PC for a few months
• Folders were shared via an external hard drive shared on a PC with no folder permissions
• All users mentioned the performance was slow on a number of workstations & laptops. Some of the older workstations still had Windows XP installed
• There was no encryption on any of the laptops that go offsite with sensitive data
• The broadband network was shared with another business in the same building.
The Solution
After spending time reviewing the clients IT system and working methods, we agreed a solution with the client to implement a refresh of the current infrastructure. We would add a couple of servers to manage certain aspects of the IT System, install a firewall for security and upgrade some of the older workstations.
Key Fixes
• We implemented a solution to manage user accounts, computers and policies to control what users can/can’t do on the computers. Every user then has their own login account for any computer on the network.
• A backup solution was setup on the File Server which alerts thecitysecret & our client when the backup fails. The backup is onsite and cloud based to ensure there is no data loss.
• A virtual File Server was setup with security permissions on the folders based on the users department
• We upgraded all the machines with an SSD drive and a few with increased memory which saw a great performance boost. The older Windows XP computers were replaced with new Windows 10 computers.
• We encrypted all the computers and laptops to provide protection to the sensitive data in case they are lost or stolen.
• A firewall was implemented so we could separate the businesses in the building for security. he seperate networks and make them secure
Outcome
This was a great project for both our client and thecitysecret, the client now sees improved productivity from their employees due to the PC performance increase and because there is no downtime with the file server. The biggest change our client says is they can sleep at night knowing they now have functioning backups on and offsite.
We have an ongoing Managed IT Support with this client offering remote support for the end users and running daily monitoring & update tasks on all their business devices.
