Cloud Direct customers Stewart Martin, IT expert and partner at Edmund Carr accountancy firm, and Stephen Court, IT supervisor at Crondall Energy, share what it’s like to work with Microsoft gold partner Cloud Direct.

They discuss the latest stages in their cloud migration journeys – to Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure – and their future plans, working with Cloud Direct. Topics include security, business growth, working productively, flexibly and efficiently.

Here’s a long-cut of the video transcript:

They’ve been an absolute pleasure to deal with from start to finish.

I think with the growth… it’s helped us grow to the size where, we now know we can be any place anywhere but still be one office.

As a technical person myself it’s very important to me that the people that I’m talking to understand what they’re looking at.

Cutting edge technology from Microsoft

Cloud Direct has allowed us to make the most of our IT infrastructure by linking it to our backup solutions. They’ve reduced costs and keep us on top of cutting edge technology

Hassle-free migration with Cloud Direct

I was very happy with how Cloud Direct handled the migration.

The migration was seamless, actually. The staff at Cloud Direct helped explain the situation – what they were doing at each stage. Some of it was quite complicated technically but they helped me through that and it was all happening in the background without really any input from me to a certain extent. And there was certainly no downtime which was crucial to a business like ours – we have to respond to our client queries in a timely manner, and there was no downtime at all so it was excellent.

From an employee perspective, they didn’t notice at all. All of our servers stayed up and we didn’t need to restart any of them. The agents went on, we set up the backups, we made sure that those backups were actually running, and then we did some test restores and everything was fine – very smooth.

I could just rely on their ability to do it without having to spend too much of my time getting involved in it, cos it all worked in the background in a very smooth manner.

We had a couple of issues with one of our backups in that our files are actually confidential. And one of them was very highly locked down and encrypted. So we actually had to take a look at how those permissions would work with the agent and then make changes in order to get it back up. We allowed them to log onto our server to take a look at the permissions structure and then make those changes, and everything was done quite smoothly and quickly.

A safe and secure cloud service

We do have the dichotomy of having very secure and confidential data, and at the same time needing to keep that data safe, keeping that data backed up. The worst thing to possibly happen would be to lose all our information in one hit.

We had a few issues with virus attacks and things that had actually caused downtime for a couple of days in the office and that certainly focused our minds. If we could move that off-site then it would be much better for the continuity of the firm going forward. A part of our disaster recovery plan, if we did have a problem then it would be much more secure being in the cloud and looked after properly.

They have both the gold partnership with Microsoft which gives them direct access to the third line support that they actually require. Before Cloud Direct, we would’ve had to take a lot of drives to an offsite location, set up servers there and then restore those drives. It’s a very manual process that we’ve managed to avoid.

Work productively from anywhere with Office 365

Cloud in itself gives you a lot of opportunities. If you’ve got a disparate workforce, for instance, it allows you to access it from anywhere. So internet access is now the only requirement that you have.

So my employees have benefited because they’ve been able to be much more contactable in a mobile situation. A lot of them work out of the office – working at clients’ premises, and that’s enabled them to stay in touch with the office and communicate with us. And when we’ve needed to contact them urgently, the emails been there, and if they’ve been at home they’ve been able to pick up those emails so we can get back to our clients in a much timelier manner.

Professional and helpful

With Cloud Direct, it’s enabled me to spend a lot more time with my clients rather than dealing with technology. As the IT partner, IT is very important for us but it doesn’t need to take over.

Efficient, friendly and professional.

They understood our questions, they understood our infrastructure, they understood our challenges.

When we’ve had queries they’ve come back to us very quickly.

Their cloud journey continues

I’d be very happy to recommend Cloud Direct. They’ve been excellent so far in the service they’ve provided, they continue to provide a great service and we’re hoping they’ll continue to – and I’m sure they will – in the future as well.

Making sure that we’re ready for the future.

We’ll definitely use them again.