Charity

Cloud Migration in Salisbury for Charity Plantlife

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

A Little Bit About Plantlife

Plantlife, based in Salisbury, Wiltshire, is a British conservation charity working nationally and internationally to save threatened wildflowers, plants and fungi. They own nearly 4,500 acres of nature reserve across England, Scotland and Wales. They have 11,000 members and supporters and HRH The Prince of Wales is their Patron.

The Challenge

Understanding the Clients Needs

Hardware and software infrastructure needed to be refreshed, Plantlife wanted to understand the financial difference between retaining on-prem servers and purchasing software versus cloud migration where the bulk of services consumed (email, file storage, security etc.) would be moved to the cloud. The Silver Cloud Business helped Plantlife understand the financials of both solutions from which they decided it was a better to go with a cloud migration strategy using a Cloud First approach. Not all their servers are at the end of their economic life and some are running software that needs to be kept on-premise to get the best return on the investment in these assets. Plantlife also need to maintain compliance with legalisation and be able to manage GDPR data subject access requests (DSARs) which has been improved by moving to Microsoft 365 and Azure.

Plantlife also wanted to move away from a dependence of on-premise servers and replication between sites that was being used for disaster recovery purposes. The main problem with the approach was that the secondary site that would be used to host servers in a disaster situation does not have sufficient bandwidth to service all the users and it would take a long time to increase the network bandwidth if a disaster was ever invoked and a cloud-based approach would remove this issue.

Relationship

Why Plantlife Chose Silver Cloud Business for their Cloud Migration

Plantlife has had a relationship with ABC Networking also based in Salisbury, Wiltshire, (now trading as Silver Cloud Business) since 2008. The Silver Cloud Business has been retained by Plantlife to provide high level IT support, advice and expertise when required.

Our Solution

Cloud Migration Whilst Utilising the Existing Assets

The Silver Cloud Business designed a solution that provided all of the benefits of cloud migration with still being able to sweat the existing assets that are not being migrated yet.

The cloud migration element was achieved by rolling out Microsoft 365 to all users, migrating email from the on-prem Microsoft Exchange server to Microsoft 365 and building and populating SharePoint and Teams sites. The data has been migrated to various targets based on the usage with personal data being migrated to Microsoft OneDrive, departmental data being moved to team sites and company wide data being migrated to SharePoint online.

Microsoft Teams has also been used for teams to collaborate as well as use the chat, voice and video calling both internally and with third parties externally.

OneDrive has also been configured to backup each users’ documents folder, pictures folder and desktop which means that in the event of a machine having a hardware failure, or being lost of stolen, the data can be recovered to a replacement machine.

All machines with a TPM chip have had Bitlocker encryption enabled to protect the data stored locally.

Plantlife is a registered charity which means they are eligible to greatly reduced Microsoft licence subscriptions, which are purchased through The Silver Cloud Business.

The benefits:

All staff can now access all email and files remotely, Microsoft 365 allows each member of staff to run the software on up to 5 different devices.
Plantlife is no longer reliant on investing significant sums in internal server hardware assets.
Departmental data is now stored in Teams, allowing each department to collaborate effectively.
Plantlife is able to respond to data subject access requests far more efficiently.
The cost of migration was 35% less than the cost of the cost of replacing all the servers and migrating to new on-premise servers and hardware.
Taking a server hardware and software replacement cycle as every four years, migrating to the cloud is saving Plantlife £5,000 per year, every year, good news for subscribers and the environment.
Data indexing and discovery.
Ability to work securely from anywhere there is an internet connection.

Local Charity The Trussell Trust, Adopts Full Cloud Services in Salisbury

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Our Client

The Trussell Trust is a leading anti-poverty charity which supports a nationwide network of food banks. Together they provide emergency food and support to people locked in poverty and campaign for change to create a hunger free future where food banks are no longer needed. There are more than 1,200 food bank centres in the Trussell Trust’s network, roughly two thirds of all the food banks in the UK. The Trussell Trust supports these food banks to provide nutritionally balanced emergency food parcels to people in crisis who have been referred to them by advice agencies, GPs, schools, and others. Food banks also offer people support and guidance to help them resolve the crises they are facing.

The Problem

Inconsistent software across workstations and laptops, outdated servers and a need for a more flexible working environment

The Trussell Trust was running a fully supported version of Windows server in a hypervisor environment with VM’s running Active Directory and Exchange 2010 and file shares.

Workstations and laptops were running a mixture of Windows 7 and Windows 10 with Office 2010. A 2008 R2 terminal server was being used for remote access and was due to go out of support with Microsoft.

The organisation wanted to get all IT systems, workstations, and laptops running supported software and the latest Microsoft Office applications.

They also wanted to get away from the old version of Microsoft Exchange and move their files to the cloud and migrate into SharePoint to become less reliant on on-premise servers and remove the 2008 R2 Terminal server.

The Solution

Utilising the full suite of Microsoft Office tools to ensure consistency and collaboration

A new Microsoft 365 tenant was created using the not-for-profit portal. AD Sync tool was installed into their on-prem environment and their Active directory was synced up with M365 in full hybrid mode.

The appropriate licensing was applied to the users, workstations and laptops were upgraded where appropriate and the new office applications were installed.

Once all machines were upgraded, the email hosting on Exchange 2010 was migrated using the cutover migration process to cloud-based Exchange online. This was done with no email downtime for the users.

Once the mail was all cut over, the Exchange 2010 server was de-commissioned and switched off.

To provide a solution for remote access so that the old terminal server could be removed before a SharePoint migration could be done, we deployed Direct Access for all users which were licensed for Windows 10 Enterprise under their not-for-profit E3 Licensing.

As soon as the Trussell Trust was able to proceed with the migration of files to SharePoint, this was done using the Microsoft SharePoint Migration Tool in a staged manner to avoid users not being able to access file shares.

Once each share was migrated it was made read-only on the on-premises systems for reference purposes only and to ensure continuity of data.

Microsoft Teams was also deployed during this stage to make every user experience much easier and more flexible.

The only exception to the SharePoint Migration was the Accounts files that were required to stay on-premises due to the accounting package in use. However, we were able to utilise the Direct Access system that was deployed earlier in the project to assist with remote access to this.

The Outcome

Fully supported and up-to-date in a Hybrid cloud environment

The finished project meant that the organisation is now running its IT systems on fully supported software and operating systems, with the latest office applications in a Hybrid cloud environment. Staff are able to work much more efficiently moving forward with flexible working, with the majority of their systems fully cloud-based.

Disaster Recovery in Salisbury for Charity DBF & DBE

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Our Client

Salisbury Diocesan Board of Finance (DBF) is a charitable organisation that is linked with many charities, church organisations, mission agencies, non-government organisations, retreat houses and trusts.

The problem

A Fair Amount of Time to Recover Should There Be a Total Loss of Their Systems

DBF / DBE were concerned that despite having full back ups of their IT systems, if there were to be a total loss of IT systems there would be a fair time involved to recover them to a situation that the organisation could function correctly.

The charity already had significant diverse infrastructure, so the plan was to leverage existing hardware and sufficiently air gapped buildings to deploy a IT disaster recovery solution that would ensure business continuity. This way they could continue to function should one of their servers or sites become unavailable.

The Solution

Utilising Microsoft Technology in a Bespoke Way

To do this we used existing Microsoft technology in a bespoke way to keep two separate warm standby replicas of the servers on-site and off-site using the two separate sites. Each site housed primary servers for itself and replicas of the same site and the other sites servers as secondary copies which were kept in sync through local and extended replication.

This means that if the main IT system fails for its primary site or incur a loss the first replica would be invoked, and their systems would be back up and running in a matter of minutes.

If either site were to incur a total failure or a loss, then the second replica would be invoked, and the systems could be accessed remotely until the lost site were recovered and have their systems back online at the site.

This system is also completely expandable so if a secondary replica was invoked then another copy of that can be made to always keep a warm standby in operation in case of a further failure.

The Outcome

Faster and More Reliable Recovery Times

This solution has a Recovery Point Objective of 5 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective of 30 minutes meaning that if a server or site were lost then only 5 minutes of work would be lost and it would only take 30 minutes at most to bring the systems back online.

Moving to Microsoft 365 has enabled Girlguiding South West England to improve productivity and collaboration

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

INTRODUCTION

Our Client

Girlguiding is the leading charity for girls and young women. Offering services to Rainbows (ages 4-7 years), Brownies (ages 7-10 years), Guides (ages 10-14 years) and Rangers (ages 14-18 years).

Girlguiding South West England (GGSWE) provides a range of activities and opportunities for girls and young women aged from 4 years to adult in Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Dorset, Devon, Cornwall, Isle of Wight, Jersey and Guernsey.

THE PROBLEM

Out of date ways of working, hardware and software across the organisation, with the need for a more collaborative and flexible working environment

Girlguiding South West England was working using an on-prem server running Server 2016 Essentials for Active Directory and file storage with email provided by a paid-for third-party hosting company using IMAP mail, and a separate third-party cloud storage provider used to share information with volunteers. They were also reliant on supporting multiple computers to provide remote access to computers left on in the office by remote workers, using a third-party VPN solution.

End user hardware was a mix of equipment, purchased at different times so there was little consistency in makes and models of hardware in use in the organisation, meaning that there was also inconsistency in the operating system versions, builds and software deployed on the computers. Staff were using different versions of Microsoft Office, either licensed COTS products or through using subscriptions in Office 365, through one of three Tenants setup for the organisation, but all were disjointed.

Staff struggled with working remotely, there was difficulty collaborating both in the office and remotely and there were some "work arounds" in order to fulfil missing functionality such as sharing calendar information or being able to work on the same data in real time. Different data repositories required different login information and added an additional layer of management complexity and also exposed the organisation to further risk.

OUR SOLUTION

Utilising the full suite of Microsoft Office 365 for collaboration and flexible working

The Silver Cloud Business has worked with GGSWE to create a project to ensure that all steps in the migration process can be accommodated and embraced by the staff and volunteers. A phased approach has minimised disruption and has eased in the new ways of working through demonstration of the benefits and tangible improvement in day to working.

The first step of the process was for The Silver Cloud Business to assist GGSWE in benefitting the Microsoft Non-profits grant after assistance in the application process. Staff are now enrolled in Azure Active Directory with multi-factor authentication enabled.

Email has been migrated away from the hosted IMAP server, and is now hosted in Office 365, giving users the ability to share information such as calendars for the first time, improving productivity. The move to Microsoft 365 has also resulted in GGSWE being able to use Microsoft Teams properly, with all users now in the same Tenant, improving security significantly.

For the first time, volunteers have access to email and data as well as collaboration tools through the use of Microsoft Web Applications.

Data has been migrated away from the on-prem file server into SharePoint online, which has allowed staff to be able to securely access data whilst away from the office.

In order to help stretch the IT project budget even further, The Silver Cloud Business has supplied business spec refurbished laptops, each with a three-year warranty, providing GGSWE with nearly new business spec laptops, that still have at least three years life in terms of spec and performance, for half the cost of new equipment.

Whilst the project is still in progress, the changes in ways of working have already been significant for GGSWE. It has allowed the key staff in the organisation to collaborate securely with the large group of volunteers and it has provided a secure way for volunteers to interact with head office within a single tenant and security domain.

THE OUTCOME

Fully supported and up-to-date in the Microsoft 365 cloud environment

The finished project means that GGSWE is now running its IT systems on fully supported software and operating systems, with the latest office applications in the Microsoft 365 cloud environment.

What our clients say - Salisbury Foodbank

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Maria Stephenson - Salisbury Foodbank Manager

Silver Cloud understood our needs as a small charity in a larger network of charities and have been instrumental connecting our core team and trustees via MS365, including training, network support and telephony. We are confident our documents are safe and secure. Silver cloud are not just at the end of the phone, they are physically by your side when you need them to be. Providing solutions to external internet outages to allow us to continue supporting people in crisis in our community. They have also been kind to gift us charitable laptops when our outreach has expanded. Our charity is driven to support local people, working alongside local business’ is just as important to us. Their engineers have become part of our extended foodbank family.