Castle Clothing - Managed IT Services

When Castle Clothing and Syscom were working on their implementation of ApparelX, discussions were also had about their IT requirements. The team at Castle Clothing were pleased that Syscom were able to complement the ERP software installation with Managed IT services.

They were not happy with their current IT provider and had been experiencing a lot of issues and downtime.

Network Discovery

Syscom’s managed IT team completed a full network discovery and highlighted all the issues. To point out a few; the network was badly configured – which caused slow network performance, the Exchange (email) server was partially configured – which caused a lot of email-related issues, the active directory was untidy with the previous migration and was not organised, and there was no proper firewall which left the whole network vulnerable to all sorts of malicious attacks. All these issues caused their team to put in a lot of IT support calls.

The managed IT team at Syscom recorded all the issues users were experiencing and gave a report back to the company with suggested fixes. Castle decided to invest in what was required to fix the problems they were having, so their network was redesigned and configured according to the best practices recommended by Microsoft. The team at Castle were pleased with the drastic reduction in IT problems their staff were having – support calls reduced by 70% - and that streamlining the system resulted in a reduction in IT costs.

Backups

Another issue that Castle Clothing was having was with backups – previously all backups were on one hard drive, which was poorly configured, and the version of the backup software they were using worked in a way that to restore a single file, they had to restore the full server (2TB) of data. Syscom recommended a fully secure off-site Cloud Backup. This not only eliminated the need to change the backup media every day and take it offsite, but it was it was protected from ransomware and malicious attacks.

Hardware Support

The team at Syscom also helped to replace hardware and provide ongoing hardware support to keep downtime to a minimum.

“The IT team at Syscom provide us with a great safety net, their experience and knowledge ensure issues are dealt with promptly. Connectivity and reliability are also much improved, ensuring our customers receive an uninterrupted service, which is very important to us.” Rob Ansell, Managing Director.