CoAction improve customer experience by moving to the Cloud
Customer Case Study
CoAction improve customer experience by moving to the Cloud Coaction a West Cork organisation who offer vital services for children and adults with an intellectual disability and autism had a need to improve their ICT systems to enable them to continue to provide a integral resource to the community.
Customer Overview CoAction West Cork was founded over 40 years ago by family members and volunteers and is now the designated service provider for children and adults with an intellectual disability and autism in West Cork. CoAction’s vision is to support people to live a life of their choosing within their local community and provides comprehensive supports to almost 500 children and 165 adults in the West Cork Area.
Challenge CoAction ICT services were historically plagued by connectivity and speed issues that relied on poor rural broadband and locally administered servers for file and email services. CoAction suffered regular service interruptions for various reasons and when these occurred branch access to data and email would be unavailable.
Solution PFH partnered with CoAction to analyse the problems being encountered and to assess how to support these services to enable the organisation to provide a better service. We began by completing our standard Cloud Readiness Assessment. This is PFH’s proven standardised process for guiding medium sized organisations in determining their initial cloud strategy with a view to preparing plans to implement a level of cloud adoption. The process follows a formula that is customised for the market to: Analyse the business requirement; Analyse current systems for cloud fit; Analyse the security requirements; Analyse support and adoption requirements; Define the implementation requirements. The resulting readiness assessment was presented, reviewed and costs for implementation and management prepared. CoAction then decided to proceed with the plan and PFH moved to implement the solution What we delivered PFH delivered a hybrid cloud solution that comprised of
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for file and Active Directory services, coupled with remote desktop services in the cloud. Mail was migrated to Microsoft Office 365 and a new VPN based WAN solution put in place that centred on Azure and Office 365 as opposed to connecting back to Bantry. PFH approached the implementation with the guiding tenant of ensuring continuous service access. The meant planning migration of the cloud candidate solutions in a manner that maintained access and ensured the network connectivity was also maintained. The output from the readiness fit identified that: Payroll systems and a local domain controller should remain on premise; Azure site-to-site VPN’s would be commissioned to connect each of the five CoAction locations to Azure (which inherently then removes the single point of failure of the Bantry connection for the branches); Active Directory services along with DirSyc for Office 365 and the file services would be migrated to IaaS servers in the PFH Azure Subscription; Access to services in the Azure Subscription would be provided through RDS servers running in Azure; Mail services would be migrated to Office 365; The key element for CoAction in the commission of this service is that PFH would also provide and end-to-end managed service for the management of the complete solution. The project was commissioned by the Managed Services team and successfully implemented.
Benefits CoAction now has a complete managed service for their ICT that has resulted in improved performance, availability and reliability for their ICT systems. Each solution deployed has impacted on every single end user in the organisation in some way, and provides these users with the ability to improve their productivity and utilise the best in technology to deliver a better service to their own customers. From a technology perspective CoAction now has a robust and flexible hybrid cloud environment that enables:
Customer Case Study
Improved performance for systems and access based on RDS and Azure IaaS;
Rapid response to business needs in terms of expansion of resources (servers etc.);
Increased availability and reliability of key ICT systems; Cloud based email through Office 365;
About PFH PFH Technology Group are a true Information and Communications Technology provider, being able to deliver both IT and communications as a service or a full ICT integrated solution. PFH have built their service offerings around customer’s needs, successfully helping organisations align ICT with business goals. PFH provide superior ICT infrastructure and professional solutions, products and services to reduce your costs and free up your time.
Streamlined service operations with a complete managed service from PFH.
Core Technologies Used
PFH currently employ over 200 technical and core staff in our offices in Dublin, Cork and Galway. We deliver our services and products to all four corners of the island.
The key technologies used to deliver this solution were: Microsoft Office 365; PFH Cloud (based on Azure); HP Servers & Storage; Windows Server 2012r2; RDS; SPLA Licensing.
PFH Technology Group Dublin | Cork | Galway www.pfh.ie P: 1850 734 100 E: [email protected]
CoAction improve customer experience by moving to the Cloud Coaction a West Cork organisation who offer vital services for children and adults with an intellectual disability and autism had a need to improve their ICT systems to enable them to continue to provide a integral resource to the community.
Customer Overview CoAction West Cork was founded over 40 years ago by family members and volunteers and is now the designated service provider for children and adults with an intellectual disability and autism in West Cork. CoAction’s vision is to support people to live a life of their choosing within their local community and provides comprehensive supports to almost 500 children and 165 adults in the West Cork Area.
Challenge CoAction ICT services were historically plagued by connectivity and speed issues that relied on poor rural broadband and locally administered servers for file and email services. CoAction suffered regular service interruptions for various reasons and when these occurred branch access to data and email would be unavailable.
Solution PFH partnered with CoAction to analyse the problems being encountered and to assess how to support these services to enable the organisation to provide a better service. We began by completing our standard Cloud Readiness Assessment. This is PFH’s proven standardised process for guiding medium sized organisations in determining their initial cloud strategy with a view to preparing plans to implement a level of cloud adoption. The process follows a formula that is customised for the market to: Analyse the business requirement; Analyse current systems for cloud fit; Analyse the security requirements; Analyse support and adoption requirements; Define the implementation requirements. The resulting readiness assessment was presented, reviewed and costs for implementation and management prepared. CoAction then decided to proceed with the plan and PFH moved to implement the solution What we delivered PFH delivered a hybrid cloud solution that comprised of
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for file and Active Directory services, coupled with remote desktop services in the cloud. Mail was migrated to Microsoft Office 365 and a new VPN based WAN solution put in place that centred on Azure and Office 365 as opposed to connecting back to Bantry. PFH approached the implementation with the guiding tenant of ensuring continuous service access. The meant planning migration of the cloud candidate solutions in a manner that maintained access and ensured the network connectivity was also maintained. The output from the readiness fit identified that: Payroll systems and a local domain controller should remain on premise; Azure site-to-site VPN’s would be commissioned to connect each of the five CoAction locations to Azure (which inherently then removes the single point of failure of the Bantry connection for the branches); Active Directory services along with DirSyc for Office 365 and the file services would be migrated to IaaS servers in the PFH Azure Subscription; Access to services in the Azure Subscription would be provided through RDS servers running in Azure; Mail services would be migrated to Office 365; The key element for CoAction in the commission of this service is that PFH would also provide and end-to-end managed service for the management of the complete solution. The project was commissioned by the Managed Services team and successfully implemented.
Benefits CoAction now has a complete managed service for their ICT that has resulted in improved performance, availability and reliability for their ICT systems. Each solution deployed has impacted on every single end user in the organisation in some way, and provides these users with the ability to improve their productivity and utilise the best in technology to deliver a better service to their own customers. From a technology perspective CoAction now has a robust and flexible hybrid cloud environment that enables:
Customer Case Study
Improved performance for systems and access based on RDS and Azure IaaS;
Rapid response to business needs in terms of expansion of resources (servers etc.);
Increased availability and reliability of key ICT systems; Cloud based email through Office 365;
About PFH PFH Technology Group are a true Information and Communications Technology provider, being able to deliver both IT and communications as a service or a full ICT integrated solution. PFH have built their service offerings around customer’s needs, successfully helping organisations align ICT with business goals. PFH provide superior ICT infrastructure and professional solutions, products and services to reduce your costs and free up your time.
Streamlined service operations with a complete managed service from PFH.
Core Technologies Used
PFH currently employ over 200 technical and core staff in our offices in Dublin, Cork and Galway. We deliver our services and products to all four corners of the island.
The key technologies used to deliver this solution were: Microsoft Office 365; PFH Cloud (based on Azure); HP Servers & Storage; Windows Server 2012r2; RDS; SPLA Licensing.
PFH Technology Group Dublin | Cork | Galway www.pfh.ie P: 1850 734 100 E: [email protected]
