Case Study: Insurance and Financial Services – Wingate
Extech Cloud helped create a modern workplace for employee benefits consultants, Wingate Financial Planning.
Wingate Group was established in 1970 and is based in Caterham, Surrey with 40 staff members. Wingate Financial Planning is an award-winning firm of Chartered Financial Planners helping individuals to understand and achieve their lifetime financial goals.
“We moved all our staff seamlessly from working in the office to their homes with no management support necessary and Microsoft Teams has become our new best friend!”
Paul Weeks, Commercial Director, Wingate Financial Planning
Background
Extech Cloud began working with the Wingate Group in 2018, initially providing support and advising on how to renew aging IT systems.
At the time, the team had tired on-site servers, with an application hosted by a private cloud provider, although they were already in the process of evaluating a SaaS cloud line of business application. Wingate required the legacy application as a system of record to retain access to client history.
The Wingate Group also had several critical requirements that were essential when it came to moving their IT operations to the Cloud. Security, GDPR compliance and meeting industry standards, and what’s required of insurance and financial Institutions, were top of the list.
Journey to the cloud
At the time of the move to the Cloud, the Modern Workplace concept was still relatively new. The team at Extech Cloud developed a Cloud infrastructure for the company and configured management for user accounts, endpoint security and compliance policies, giving the team at Wingate peace of mind.
Emails were then migrated to the Cloud, along with company files and data to SharePoint and OneDrive. The company was also set up with MS Teams for better collaboration.
The team also required occasional access to their legacy application, which was only needed for infrequent query access. They required SQL and application servers which are usually costly to run and require high resource.
Since the legacy application was only needed on an infrequent basis, Extech Cloud created an innovative full hosting environment for the application and configured Azure servers to start up and shut down for 3 hours each day, for 2 days a week. As Azure, a Microsoft hosting platform, is billed purely on usage, the team at Extech Cloud helped to reduce Wingate’s costs from 744 hours each month to only 24 hours each month, achieving significant cost savings.
Day-to-day support
Today, Extech Cloud provides support for any issues and requests that come from 40 Wingate staff members. The team is on-hand to provide advice on security and compliance standards as and when it’s needed, along with ensuring that processes are documented in line with regulatory body requirements at all times.
Day-to-day tasks include managing endpoint devices, ensuring they are patched, updated, encrypted and in good health, to managing Wingate’s Office 365 tenant and ensuring that any changes to the product set are evaluated and introduced as and when they’re required. Extech Cloud manages the Azure hosting service and ensures that appropriate product versions are used by the team.
Working from home and the future
Today, Extech Cloud provides support for any issues and requests that come from 40 Wingate staff members. The team is on-hand to provide advice on security and compliance standards as and when it’s needed, along with ensuring that processes are documented in line with regulatory body requirements at all times.
Day-to-day tasks include managing endpoint devices, ensuring they are patched, updated, encrypted and in good health, to managing Wingate’s Office 365 tenant and ensuring that any changes to the product set are evaluated and introduced as and when they’re required. Extech Cloud manages the Azure hosting service and ensures that appropriate product versions are used by the team.
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