As PSP has grown since its inception in 2008, the need for robust and resilient systems has grown too. Tools and services available to business now have changed hugely over that time. As a result of accelerated growth in the last 6 months and the employment of several new staff, PSP recognised the need for the infrastructure to change to support the extra capacity. These enhancements were designed with business continuity in mind.

Requirements

• Allow secure and auditable access to all corporate documents
• Implement a “go anywhere” working methodology for communications and collaboration
• Provide an efficient and secure method of access to on premise development environments
• Reduce risk of data loss further to include unlimited data storage and indefinite retention for business data
• Increase our capability to deliver cloud services efficiently for our office-based staff but also to access on premise services without any loss of performance
• Ensure all new services allow for business continuity by design

Solution

As a business with Office 365 E3 with the Enterprise Mobility Suite in use already for email, we decided to make use of many of these features to boost security, availability and collaboration. This involved the implementation of the following 365 services:

• All personal staff files moved from locally mapped server drives to OneDrive
• Migration of all documents from locally mapped shared server drives to SharePoint Online
• Rollout of Microsoft Teams for collaborative working, including the management of tasks via Planner integration
• Rollout of Azure Active Directory based Multi Factor Authentication

To compliment the move of these services to 365, we implemented a cloud 365 backup solution providing unlimited data storage and indefinite data retention. This service directly integrates with Office 365 and protects all our 365 services – OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange and Teams/Planner – from data loss, however caused.

Alongside our 365 services is our cloud based telephone system. Previously only usable in the office via traditional handsets, the business rolled out app-based telephony removing the need for these traditional handsets and allowing our staff to work from anywhere using their company laptop or mobiles. This change was made with no impact to our customers and no downtime meaning our customers can contact us as they always have, no matter where our teams are based.

To support all these cloud services, we’re improving our office connectivity by moving up to a 100mb/100mb dedicated leased line circuit. When not in the office, this allows our development team access to our on premise development environments without any bandwidth constraints but ensures when in the office, our new cloud first approach is always available.

It’s these new services which have allowed PSP to continue to operate as normal in today’s working from home world.