Prosperity Advisers Group
When Prosperity needed to refresh their ageing infrastructure, turning to the cloud was the obvious choice.
The summary
Business Challenge:
Re-design and manage an IT system for a growing and diversified financial services company.
Solution:
Deliver core business applications via the cloud. Provide comprehensive updates, support and maintenance. Move data storage off-site to a secure data centre and provide connectivity between offices.
Results:
- Improved system and application performance.
- Scalability and flexibility through cloud computing.
- Disaster recovery and data-loss/business interruption issues neutralised.
The Situation
Over twenty years ago, Prosperity Advisers were a local Newcastle accounting firm taking care of small businesses. Since then, the company has experienced rapid growth. Today, they have offices in Brisbane, Sydney, and Newcastle. However, with growth, came growing pains.
“The original model we had for IT was built around a central hub for one office and could not effectively scale with our business,” says Stephen Guthrie, Business Services and Taxation Director at Prosperity.
“We’d tack bits on to accommodate the growing number of users and new offices, but it got to the point where it needed to be completely overhauled.”
The company experienced several trigger points that brought the realisation their IT system was outdated closer to home.
The centralisation of all the company’s data at their Newcastle office meant nationwide outages for Prosperity during local power failures. In addition to this, there were significant disaster-recovery vulnerabilities.
Prosperity was also having problems updating applications because of outdated server software. “We really had to go back to scratch and do things differently, ” says Guthrie.
The Solution
The solution to Prosperity’s issues lay in the cloud. While Prosperity maintained a small internal IT department and some on-site hardware, their core business applications – such as email, office applications, and databases – were moved to Brennan’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform.
The move reduced Prosperity’s reliance on their aging hardware and guaranteed a level of uptime and protection that wasn’t available when Prosperity managed their IT in-house.
Prosperity also opted for Brennan’s Managed IT Services. This pro-active maintenance agreement meant that while their IT staff could perform administrative tasks and maintain the desktops on-site, care and maintenance of the critical business systems were assigned to Brennan.
Once dependent on considerable capital investment every couple of years to ensure the infrastructure was up to date, Prosperity’s new cloud-based IT infrastructure ensured that Prosperity would always be running on fully up-to-date systems and hardware for a simple monthly fee.
The Result
Moving Prosperity’s core applications away from their premises tackled the downtime issues and dependence on the Newcastle office’s infrastructure that had previously been hurting them.
Their disaster recovery position was also significantly strengthened, with secure storage and backups of their data in Brennan’s data centres. This move means that catastrophe at one of the Prosperity site offices would no longer bring the risk of massive data loss.
The virtualisation of Prosperity’s core business applications, and their delivery via the cloud, ensured that business interruptions due to IT issues were no longer a headache.
“If a piece of hardware blew up, then the fact that it was all virtualised and could be replicated quickly was reassuring,” says Guthrie.
Additionally, the easy scalability of the service made it compatible with Prosperity’s future growth. New sites, users, and accounts are easily incorporated into the existing infrastructure.
One of the most important aspects of the solution was the comfort and security that Managed IT Services brought, according to Guthrie.
“There was a sleep-better-at-night aspect to it too, in knowing that instead of just relying on our internal team, we had a team of experts on call to support our needs,” he says.
The re-design and upgrade will also bring future benefits, as the solution is designed to have the ability to cater to remote devices, which will play a significant role in the growth of the business.
“It’s certainly helped the ability of our team to work remotely,” says Guthrie. “Either from home or client sites.”
It’s this future-proofing aspect of outsourcing IT to specialists that’s proving to be yet another benefit to Prosperity, according to Guthrie.
“I think the days of doing it yourself internally are long gone.”