Luxembourg Cloud Migration
The client
A small office of 10 users based in Luxembourg who were using local servers for all their data including a financial management product. After the primary server suffered a significant hardware failure the company was temporarily moved onto the secondary server to buy them enough time to look around for something longer-term. A Luxembourg based IT firm recommended a straight two-server swap out with an upfront spend of around €15,000 in hardware and migration costs. The proposed solution did nothing to remove single-points of failure and left the client vulnerable to the same situation occurring again. A viable disaster recovery solution it was not.
A small office of 10 users based in Luxembourg who were using local servers for all their data including a financial management product. After the primary server suffered a significant hardware failure the company was temporarily moved onto the secondary server to buy them enough time to look around for something longer-term. A Luxembourg based IT firm recommended a straight two-server swap out with an upfront spend of around €15,000 in hardware and migration costs. The proposed solution did nothing to remove single-points of failure and left the client vulnerable to the same situation occurring again. A viable disaster recovery solution it was not.
Our proposed solution
Upon further investigation we found the application developer offered a cloud based equivalent that the current data could be migrated into. This just left the issue of the local data, which could easily be moved into Dropbox for Business. As each time a PC was replaced the client was also purchasing an individual Microsoft Office licence it seemed a good opportunity to also move their email online into Office 365 and save a bit of extra money that way, this also gave the added advantage of being able to standardise all PC's on the same version of MS Office.
Upon further investigation we found the application developer offered a cloud based equivalent that the current data could be migrated into. This just left the issue of the local data, which could easily be moved into Dropbox for Business. As each time a PC was replaced the client was also purchasing an individual Microsoft Office licence it seemed a good opportunity to also move their email online into Office 365 and save a bit of extra money that way, this also gave the added advantage of being able to standardise all PC's on the same version of MS Office.
As well as these advantages it also meant that all of the data, whether it be email, documents or financial could be accessed from outside the office and was not dependent on one or two servers to keep running. If the office were inaccessible users could continue to work from another location in exactly the same way as if they were in the office. Dropbox for Business also provided the client with an built-in back-up facility.
Implementation
Once the financial application had been migrated, we then proceeded to move all the data over into Dropbox for Business. After a couple of initial challenges with file and directory sizes (lesson learned there!), we proceeded to migrate email into Office 365.
All in all a good piece of work for us and saved the client many thousands of euros in upfront costs, along with giving them a fixed monthly payment for the cloud services.
Implementation
Once the financial application had been migrated, we then proceeded to move all the data over into Dropbox for Business. After a couple of initial challenges with file and directory sizes (lesson learned there!), we proceeded to migrate email into Office 365.
All in all a good piece of work for us and saved the client many thousands of euros in upfront costs, along with giving them a fixed monthly payment for the cloud services.