Case Study: Accounting Services – Brainwaves
Extech Cloud helped create a modern workplace for accounting and consultancy business, Brainwaves.
Brainwaves, based in Shoreham by Sea, West Sussex, is an accountancy and consultancy business established over 20 years ago.
With a team who have diverse business backgrounds and experience across many business types, sizes and sectors, they have a unique insight into the key success factors of an owner-managed business.
“I want to say a big “Thank You” to you and your team for supporting Brainwaves in our move to homeworking, and on our return to office working”
Jill Sherwin, Director, Brainwaves
Background
Extech Cloud began working with Brainwaves in 2014, initially providing support to the 4 user operation that was using on-premise servers.
At the time, no cloud infrastructure was in place.
The Brainwaves team now includes book-keepers, accountants, tax advisers and business consultants.
Journey to the cloud
To support business plans, optimise efficiency and make IT a monthly operating cost, Brainwaves decided to move its IT operation into the cloud.
Extech Cloud worked alongside the team at Brainwaves to ensure a simple and smooth migration of various “hosted” accounts applications, including multiple versions of Sage, to a platform that would run reliably over the internet.
The move allowed for the decommissioning of an ageing local server, avoiding associated capital expense. The team at Extech also worked to ensure cost-savings by scheduling when the server is running, reducing the cost by around 50%.
Following the digital transformation, the accounting firm now takes full advantage of the benefits offered by Microsoft 365, Azure and the whole Microsoft cloud environment.
Day-to-day support
Today, Extech Cloud provides operational management of the cloud infrastructure, users and endpoints, along with advice and guidance on emerging products to make Brainwaves even more efficient.
Extech Cloud also provides service desk support and ensures continuous security compliance across the whole business.
Working from home and the future
In March 2020, the team at Brainwaves were all sent to work remotely due to Covid-19 lockdown.
The Brainwaves team were extremely delighted and pleasantly surprised that their overall working experience remained the same due to all data having already been migrated to Azure and Microsoft 365. Under their previous IT model, the experience would have been very different with the ability to work efficiently from home near-on-impossible.
Extech Cloud were on-hand to provide advice where needed, along with local connectivity assistance. Local printing and scanning, which is critical within Brainwaves’ daily operations, was affected due to lack of ability to use the MFP (multi-function printer) in the office. The team at Extech recommended and configured individual printers and scanners to allow for normal processes to resume, as if they were in the office.
“Migrating to the cloud had a huge impact on the performance and productivity of teams in London, Guildford, Houston, Calgary, Cape Town, Muscat and Dubai.”
Jill Sherwin, Director, Brainwaves
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