How BCN reduced IT disruption for Brand Potential by over 25%

First and foremost, Brand Potential’s server was old and needed an upgrade. This had been contributing to a flood of support issues. This was a critical issue; should server issues be more frequent and cause sustained downtime, that could ruin the whole business’s ability to operate.

Secondly with increased homeworking due to the pandemic, the Brand Potential team was still having to VPN into the server to access files and folders, whilst simultaneously unable to reap the full benefits of Teams due to their data being stored in a completely separate environment.

Finally, Brand Potential wanted a more seamless staff IT experience and improved collaboration. Fully utilising Microsoft 365 licences seemed like the way to go.

Brand Potential were weighing up two potential options that could work. One being a new onsite server to replace the aging one. The other option being a hybrid solution that used the old server and introduced the use of SharePoint. In the end, Brand Potential chose to move over to SharePoint as it felt like a more seamless, issue-free way of working.

This didn’t come without risks and reservations though. The new user experience in SharePoint had a danger of affecting the team’s productivity and workflow. Plus, the general uncertainty of such a big change added another layer of difficulty to the decision.

In the end though, it was an easy decision to make. If there hadn’t been a move, Brand Potential would have continued to experience problems and risk serious downtime.

We provided a hybrid cloud solution. One that helped Brand Potential move into a modern way of working and ensure that their system files were more secure and easy to use. To avoid any issues adapting to the new SharePoint setup, BCN ensured that the same file layout and appearance were copied into the new cloud environment.

BCN carried out a cloud readiness assessment of Brand Potential’s current data which was housed in both an onsite server and NAS device. The assessment outlined the current structure, which data would have issues being migrated to SharePoint (linked Excel spreadsheets for example), and helped to clarify which documents would work better by being kept locally on the NAS device (Media and design heavy files).

A small Proof of Concept (POC) was set up in order for a few users to be trained and then test a small subset of data to ensure that everything worked as Brand Potential would like and to raise any potential issues. Following the success of this POC, the migration was rolled out for the remaining data which was highlighted to move to SharePoint.

Brand Potential now has the majority of their client data in SharePoint and all of their large media and design files stored on an onsite NAS which is accessed via a VPN. SharePoint is backed up by Kaseya Spanning and the NAS is backed up offsite to Azure.

Brand potential has reported less staff frustration at the hands of their IT systems and report that they’re more capable of doing their best work with these technologies.

• This is reflected by a 25.3% reduction in the number of hours lost to support issues. Brand Potential has also seen reduced security risks.
• Their Technology Alignment Score has increased by 13% when assessed against BCN’s recommended best practice standards.