Bespoke outsourced IT gives Cumbrian property and land services group - PFK, peace of mind
FUTURE PROOFING IT
Land and estate agent, PFK is based in Penrith, Cumbria. The business had outgrown its head office in Penrith and decided to build a bespoke Head Office on the outskirts of the town. The new premises would allow integration of new businesses, recently acquired by PFK, and provide the space to expand. The local branch offices would remain in situ.
Pre-pandemic PFK had invested in their network and had also implemented Sophos Central and Sophos XG Firewalls; when the Covid-19 pandemic forced staff to socially distance and work from home, thanks to the previous IT investment, the transition was smooth and quick.
PFK needed to move from their current Head Office earlier than they had originally intended as they had a tenant who wanted to move in quickly; the new offices would not however be ready for 12 months.
The hybrid working structure that had been introduced by Conformedia in 2020 allowed staff to work flexibly across all sites. Further enhancements were introduced during the summer 2022; Conformedia supplied new fully configured Dell laptops and workstations and made further improvements to the network infrastructure, moving the business from on premise to cloud-based solution, covering mail and file storage. M365 Premium Business with SharePoint replaced Windows 2015. This not only increased programme load speed and enabled file share but also enhanced the security systems protecting the business from phishing and spam.
The Conformedia team also liaised with third party services including specialist estate agent software providers Dezrez and Rezi, to ensure all data was safely and securely migrated to the upgraded system.
Conformedia used cloud-based endpoint management solution, Microsoft Intune, to manage users and devices. This allowed remote deployment and management of policies across all devices keeping everyone secure and up to date.
All these improvements allowed staff had to vacate the Head Office, at short notice, to allow the new tenants to move in.
Thanks to the work already completed by Conformedia, the PFK team were able to move out of their Head Office quickly and smoothly, confident they could work efficiently and securely from any PFK office or home, with no disruption to day-to-day business.
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Standardisation ensures that all devices were up to date with relevant security measures
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The “plug and go” configured laptops allows staff to work efficiently from offices or remotely
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New users could be onboarded very quickly as laptops can be configured remotely and delivered direct from the supplier fully configured and ready to go
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System loading is faster increasing office productivity
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Remote deployment of policies means no downtime for staff
