The Background
Boyce Chartered Accountants (Boyce CA) is a long-established Accounting and Financial Services company specialising in servicing the needs of regional Australian individuals and businesses. With around 140 employees across five offices in rural New South Wales, Boyce CA cover the major regional centres across NSW, and face technology challenges typical of a widely distributed network.
The Challenge
The Missing Link initially worked with the Boyce CA IT team to undertake an extensive IT audit – assessing Boyce CA’s current infrastructure, systems and processes.
“Engaging The Missing Link to undertake an IT audit was key in identifying all the areas of improvement and areas where we could achieve better productivity and efficiency, while at the same time reducing our business risk. We decided to go ahead with all of their strategic recommendations for our storage, server and network environment”. - Denis Reeves, Associate Director (Wagga Wagga).
Following the audit, The Missing Link created a strategic roadmap and recommendations to modernise and transform Boyce CA’s technology systems.
The Solution
The first, and one of the most critical parts of the complete IT transformation was a refresh of branch server and storage infrastructure. Branch office hardware was reaching the end of its useful lifespan; new virtualised servers with shared storage were deployed at each branch office to provide a platform for functions that are critical to daily operations and require local performance. The next challenge to address was to provide more streamlined collaboration and connectivity
between the five regional branches. An implementation of a newer, faster Private IP Wide Area Network, incorporating The Missing Link’s SmartPATH Private IP Network was chosen. Where needed, the speed increased by up to ten times faster than their previous speeds.
With a new high-performance private network in place, Boyce CA was able to take advantage of a hybrid cloud solution built upon The Missing Link’s Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering. This platform complements on site systems and supports services deemed to be less sensitive to bandwidth or latency issues such as Microsoft Exchange.
A number of key line of business applications were also moved to this platform and are delivered through Citrix XenApp to provide the best performance regardless of location or device. By centralising these applications Boyce CA was able to reduce costs, allow for scalability and business growth, achieve hardware and software technology currency, and reduce internal IT Management overheads.
Finally, to ensure business continuity and integrity the complete IT transformation was backed up by a centralised, automated solution with a robust archival system. Automated offsite backup with multiple copies would also reduce business risk. The backup-as-a-service system was introduced to replace the existing tape-based system. The Missing Link’s backup-as-a-service offering, SmartPROTECT, provides Boyce CA with many benefits including, protection of their most important asset, affordability, reliability, speed of recovery and efficiency.
A best practise business environment
The complete IT transformation for Boyce CA allows for:
- A more efficient and collaborative working environment across the five regional branches;
- Quicker upload and download speeds allowing more uptime and productivity;
- Technology currency;
- Business continuity and reduced risk with automated off-site backup.
"The Missing Link understood our specific business requirements and delivered an efficient network which services our regional spread effectively. Our applications performance and connectivity have improved and we are able to operate our business more efficiently and productively. Not only has this project improved our operations but we've also been able to reduce business risk and cut future IT costs." - Denis Reeves, Associate Director (Wagga Wagga).
A business environment for the future
The solutions provided to Boyce CA have opened up the opportunity for more business growth in the future. By updating their aging technology and introducing a hybrid cloud solution they have allowed themselves to move toward a future of a bring (or choose) your own device environment, scale out the system over the long term or move to a complete cloud environment.
“Undertaking this project has allowed us to clearly see how the company can operate and service our clients in the future. The Missing Links’ audit and solutions have created an exciting future for our company. We had never engaged an IT services partner before and The Missing Link made the process easy; we would recommend them to anyone looking for an IT services partner.” - Denis Reeves, Associate Director (Wagga Wagga).
