Case Study – Rossborough Financial Services

The Client

Rossborough Financial are a well-established independent financial advisor (IFA) based in both Jersey and Guernsey. They provide specialist advice and services relating to corporate pensions and employee benefit arrangements.

Furthermore, they also provide individual clients with advice on services relating to investments, retirement planning and financial protection.

The Challenge

Rossborough were referred to us by our mutual friends at Virtual Cabinet (the leading document management solutions provider). From there we set up an initial remote meeting, to understand the existing IT environment and the needs of the people who rely on it.

Rossborough outlined to us some of the key challenges they were faced with, these were focused around;

• An existing hosting provider that was not upgrading the underlying server operating systems. Examples included outdated versions of Citrix, Windows Server and Microsoft Office
• The existing hosting provider was looking to retire their hosting estate, owing to the fact that they were primarily a software vendor
• Key software updates to their document management software (Virtual Cabinet) were being blocked, a concerning issue caused by the age of the underlying SQL server software version
• Lacklustre and unresponsive IT support: For example, new user account requests would be forgotten, taking in the region of 2 weeks to fulfil!

The Solution

Whilst Rossborough were experiencing a rough ride with their existing hosting provider, they knew that a managed Cloud-based service was still the correct route forward for them. This was particularly so given their two primary office locations, combined with an increasingly mobile workforce.

As a result, we suggested our Hosted Desktop service utilising Microsoft Windows Server 2019 remote (RDS) technology. This technology allowed us to create brand new Cloud servers for Rossborough, including Application, SQL, Active Directory and Remote Desktop servers.

Furthermore, we assumed the email and Microsoft Office service for Rossborough, which we integrated within their new Hosted Desktop service.

The Migration

We started the migration process as we often do with our new customers, by making our “scoping call”, a friendly and efficient way to start the project.

This allows us to learn about aspects such as existing servers, data locations, application details, user accounts, internet connections – essentially it gives us a 360-degree view of their IT systems. Furthermore their existing hosting supplier and relevant 3rd parties were introduced, for us to coordinate with and lead the project effectively.

At this stage, we were able to formulate a schedule of events for the migration process, which we could then present to the key technical representatives within Rossborough. They could then view and track the progress of all the migration milestones.

At this point, the brakes were released and we were able to start introducing the vital tools they would need in their new environment, for example copying data, setting up of applications (i.e.: Virtual Cabinet, Adobe Create Suite, Sage Accounts 50), printers and scanners.

Once their new IT system was “their” IT system, we handed over the solution a few days ahead of our scheduled “go-live” date, for some testing and overall familiarisation.

Go-Live

After a successful build and testing phase, the final thing left to do was to place Rossborough live on their new hosted solution. This process was carried out on a Monday morning for our client’s convenience.

This gave us the time we needed to place all key applications online over the preceding weekend, empowering the firm to hit the ground running on their first day. (Keeping to our “no downtime” migration mantra.)

As always, we ensured our implementation engineers remained assigned to Rossborough throughout the go-live period, until they were ready to transition to our business as usual IT support.

Post Go-live and Reflections

At the time of writing this case study, Rossborough Financial has been using the Cloud2Me Hosted Desktop solution for approximately 18 months (since April 2020). They are now very much a seasoned Cloud2Me customer and reaping the many benefits of what our Cloud service offers (not least throughout the Covid-19 pandemic).

One of the key success metrics for them, was to see an improvement upon the poor business-as-usual support that they received from their incumbent hosting provider. The good news is that Cloud2Me appeared to hit all the marks in this area!

And when we asked, whether they had any security or service availability concerns moving forwards, they responded simply:
“None… Service has been excellent”.

Summary

It’s been a true pleasure onboarding Rossborough finance and seeing their business thrive within our managed Cloud services. We’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with them, both during the service transition and every single day since, supplying their team with our IT support. And it seems the sentiment is reciprocated;