The Southern Solutions and SWL project

Are you ready to hear about the most exciting IT project of all time! Let me hear the clunk-click of your seat belt, because we are about to take you for the ride of your life!

Almost any service that your server provides can be hosted in the cloud. There are some exceptions to this, but as a whole, an SMB could run quite comfortably without the need for an in-house server these days. This was the goal for one of our customers that utilised 2 in-house servers to provide a database to their staff and remote access to that database using the remote control.

We contacted the company that provides the database-backed software and they reported that the only way to access the database if it was hosted would be to utilise remote control of a cloud server, but that simply wasn’t good enough for us. We wanted to save the customer money AND provide a more robust and reliable service, so we got to work.

Testing various ways to host the database in a cloud system, we managed to find a way in which our customers could have the application installed on their PC and access the data stored on a cloud server. Previously upgrading their connectivity to reliable and fast leased lines provided them with the perfect foundation for accessing this new cloud service available to them.

So, over a weekend we put our TV remotes down and picked up our laptops, getting to work migrating data to SharePoint and the database to Azure. A host of other services provided by the cloud have left them with no in-house servers to worry about, and a much better solution for their remote offices. In these times of remote working, having access to your data in the cloud increases productivity, allows for collaboration between staff, and eliminates data duplication.

Worried about backups? Our customer rightly was, so we explained that the hosted server has a snapshot taken daily for fast restores, and the email and file data is backed up daily using a hosted backup solution for Microsoft 365, so nothing remains unprotected.

Project management is one of the added benefits to having an experienced and knowledgeable IT Support company by your side. A company who doesn’t just say ‘it can’t be done’ but instead says ‘There must be a way’.