Roberts Nathan, with offices both in Cork and Dublin, an audit, tax and business advisor, with a team of 50 people.

There was already a migration pathway to Cloud in place for Roberts Nathan when the natural lifecycle of the on-premise server environment would come to an end, however with the arrival of the Covid pandemic the business needed to act quickly to securely allow all users to work remotely, while maintaining productivity and team collaboration.

While remote and VPN solutions worked quickly, they would not sustain the productivity required in the longer term, in particular as the year progressed into customer deadline season.

Scope of work

Compunet built out an Azure proof of concept network for to test application servers running with full Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) for end user connectivity. Adjusting and testing the Azure server and WVD environment performance hosts and layers to maximize performance and efficiency for their server applications in the process.

Once tested successfully Compunet migrated, over a weekend, all on-premise servers onto a live Azure Environment with all end users migrated to WVD, with appropriate M365 licenses, behind single sign on and two factor authentication. In addition, adding various conditional access layers for increased security provide all users a fully functional secure remote workplace environment. This was completed in advance of customer deadline season with limited user downtime, on schedule and on budget.

Benefits

Roberts Nathan firstly avoided the capex expenditure involved in replacing the on-premise environment which was already nearing end of life. As part of the migration, we also used the opportunity to bring servers from 2012R2 to server 2019 thus extending ‘OS upgrade’ capex costs for a number of years. We also worked each month for the first few months to balance the host performance level, the shutdown schedule, and the reserved instances to provide additional cost savings to the monthly subscription costs.

“As our existing Managed Service Provider, we looked to Compunet at the outset of the Covid pandemic to assess and recommend a clear pathway to provide remote connectivity solutions to meet our fast-changing needs. They delivered a well-managed and clearly communicated staged migration of our Servers, applications, data and end user requirements onto Microsoft Azure. With security and performance the key drivers we now have flexible office and remote workforce with equal capability and performance and an end to large infrastructure capex costs.”
Gail Ellis – Partner