IT Support for Small Business

THE CHALLENGE

As Tom at Sempre Analytics explains:

We develop, support and manage a range of analytical and financial planning solutions, utilising on-premise and cloud products. Examples would range from simple cloud data warehouses; through to product and sales analysis solutions, or fully automated predictive forecasting solutions.

Starting in 2011, we’ve grown from just a few of us to a team of over 30 people. The majority of our team are remote-based consultants who are heavily reliant on their laptops and the IT infrastructure that supports them.

As the head of technology, all IT support fell to me for the first few years, which I think is very typical with a small company. This would involve everything from purchasing and setting up laptops, to managing user accounts and resolving support issues. We had no real management of infrastructure, just a bunch of separate laptops, Dropbox, disconnected cloud servers, minimal security and management.

THE SOLUTION

We brought Communications Solutions UK (CSUK) in during 2018 as they were like-minded people, a great fit for Sempre and flexible on their delivery options.

From day one all support issues went to someone else. The sticker on everyone’s laptop with the CSUK details meant that I no longer had to be the one on the end of the phone. Since then I have not had to fix a single support issue.

The team set up, managed and migrated our laptops to Azure AD, instantly providing greater management, group policy and security. This ensures all laptops are compliant with our standards and are encrypted, they have the necessary software installed and are remotely managed.

The software that CSUK uses also provides an early warning system. This alerts us if hardware is about to fail and means we swap out the infrastructure immediately and ensure our team have no loss of service. CSUK manage the whole of this process, working with the vendor to fix infrastructure and swapping out faulty hardware.

Services CSUK provide:

• • • IT Service support
    • Helpdesk for staff
    • Back up and storage
    • Microsoft Office 365
    • Hardware including preconfigured laptops

THE BENEFITS

We have created a starters and leavers process with CSUK, where we now simply fill out a form. CSUK order the laptops, configure the user profiles, connect it to our environment and load the software we need.

Setting up 10 to 20 laptops each year and resolving support calls every month, meant I was spending probably 20 days a year supporting our infrastructure, when I should have been out building our business and focusing on our customers. CSUK reduced my involvement to zero within days and their support has been invaluable to the growth of Sempre  Analytics.