Customer Story: How Better Leeds Communities modernised and secured IT with PAV
ABOUT BETTER LEEDS COMMUNITIES
Better Leeds Communities aims to make Leeds a better place to live for everyone. Established as a charity in 1983, the organisation works to improve employability, provide sustained support to families and reduce child poverty in the city’s communities. This is achieved by offering a range of services citywide including advice, activities, courses, and venue hire.
THE CHALLENGE
With its provision of community services and activities across the city, Better Leeds Communities needed to modernise and secure its IT infrastructure, move into the cloud, and provide remote access tools to its users. This need became more acute further to an increase in home working, and as a result the PAV team were engaged to help assess Better Leeds’ requirements, and design effective solutions to address them.
THE SOLUTION
Following consultation with the PAV team, Better Leeds Communities opted for Microsoft 365 Business Premium. To reduce the overall cost, the PAV team were also able to assist Better Leeds with the nonprofit pricing package for these Microsoft services.
Watchguard’s Firebox T Series have also been deployed to provide an effective security package. The Watchguard solution is ideally suited to distributed working environments that have come about since the increase of home and remore working requirements, and has enabled Better Leeds’ IT team to protect the services and applications running in its cloud environment.
At a device level, Sophos Central Endpoint Protection has also been chosen to protect users’ endpoints, and the sensitive third party data residing on them.
Underpinning all of this are PAV’s Professional Services. This process involved working with the Better Leeds team to discover the desired outcomes, usage and capacity requirements upon which to base the selection of solutions. The team also worked with the customer to design the solutions and scope out delivery and costs, before deploying the appropriate technical skills and expertise to implement the solutions smoothly.
THE RESULT
The Microsoft 365 Business Premium suite of tools has enabled Better Leeds’ users to continue functioning and providing services around the city both from within the office, from home and remote locations. This package gives its users the flexibility they need to carry out effective remote work, while providing the IT team with a centrally hosted toolset to manage and administrate.
Client and third party data is also secured on the remote team’s devices with the combination of Watchguard and Sophos solutions. In addition to securing its devices against malware, ransomware and other malicious threats, Sophos’ management interface also makes it possible for Better Leeds’ IT team to monitor malicious URLs, unexpected system changes and other anomalies.
The Ubiquiti Networks solutions have also enabled the team to deploy multiple wireless networks for its users – all of which can be controlled by the IT team centrally through a web browser control panel.
“The result is that we have a perfectly scaled solution to our cloud, security and networking infrastructure, and the organisation is perfectly placed to work in whatever conditions are presented over the coming months and years.”
Taira Kayani
Chief Executive Officer
Products and Services
Microsoft 365 Business Premium (Nonprofit Staff Pricing)
WatchGuard Firebox T70 Competitive Trade In 3-Yr Basic
48-Port Gigabit PoE+(380W) Smart Managed Pro
PAV Professional Services
Sophos Central Endpoint Protection 10-24 Users 3 Yr GOVOnsite Wireless Survey
Ubiquiti UniFi Cloud Key
Ubiquiti UniFi Switch 8 Port PoE & PoE+ 150W + 2 SFP
Ubiquiti UniFi UAP AC PRO 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Access Point
PAV I.T. Services delivers first-class IT Support, Project Delivery, as well as hosted Cloud and IT Security Services to companies of all sizes across the UK. Our customers trust us to optimise their IT infrastructures to boost productivity, maintain high levels of network security and free their time to focus on their business.
