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Mercer Agencies
Company Overview
Suppliers of Garden and Christmas ranges for over 30 years, Mercer Agencies Limited has overhauled its cloud infrastructure with a suite of IT solutions working in partnership with Outsource Group, to improve performance, and protect and secure data.
Mercer Agencies Limited has a team of 30 people and has built a strong reputation for quality products in their Christmas and Garden ranges, supplying to major trade outlets across the UK and Ireland.
The Challenge
As a forward-thinking and progressive company, Mercer Agencies wanted a stronger security posture that was secured against cyber security attacks, as well as enabling collaborative and seamless working across the teams.
As was the case with many established businesses, the onset of Covid helped Mercer Agencies evaluate and recognise that its existing infrastructure needed a strategic plan to provide business continuity in the face of such seismic events.
An overhaul of infrastructure was agreed upon to meet the requirements for accelerated growth and futureproof further growth plans. Mercer Agencies enlisted the help of Outsource Group as its preferred partner following a competitive selection process. Outsource Group was chosen for its range of flexible and scalable solutions.
Resilience and growth were particularly important to Mercer Agenices, alongside being able to control the cost associated with IT infrastructure and services. As their Managed Service provider, Outsource Group was also quick to deploy remote working for the team and able to mobilise staff within 2 hours with VPN’s, private networks and Teams to facilitate collaboration and communicate more efficiently and securely during Covid.
Actions
The Outsource team implemented an interim solution that improved performance while the full overhaul was taking place. This gave Mercer Agencies time to assess existing platforms and make the informed decision that they wanted to work with a local business with a cost model that they had visibility over. Outsource Group’s OSG cloud platform was the perfect infrastructure solution, based at Outsource Group’s highly secure data centre.
This offered resilience and protection, while ensuring Mercer Agencies data was always available, backed up and secured against any potential disasters.
To increase productivity and collaboration across Mercer Agencies, Outsource Group migrated the company’s email servers to Microsoft 365 and deployed firewalls and antivirus that provides protected access to the business’ portals, along with real time monitoring and advanced security protection.
Technology Used
- Managed Service
- OSG Cloud
- Hosted Firewall
- Windows Upgrade
- Mobile Device Management
- Data Migration
- Dedicated Lease Line
Outcome
- 24/7/365 incident response and resolution
- Improved infrastructure reliability
- A well-monitored environment provides greater visibility
- Consistent service and support levels
- Improved user satisfaction
- Improved confidence in IT to deliver supportive outcomes
- An integrated working environment across multiple sites allows maximum connectivity and collaboration
Results
- Increased Security & Monitoring
- Reduced downtime Reinforced
- Reliable back up
- Enhanced scalability
- Modernised IT estate
- Infrastructure
- Increased efficiency with Fast
“Following the quick response time during covid, we worked with Outsource Group to successfully identify opportunities for improvement within our infrastructure. This proactive approach allowed us to work towards finding solutions that would support our accelerated growth. As we continued to expand, we recognised the importance of evaluating our infrastructure. We wanted to bring a technology partner on-board as this collaboration would provide the necessary resources to help implement and manage the level of services needed. Having tried alternative cloud options that were costly and provided little visibility of consumption, we wanted to work with a local company that had access and knowledge to a cloud platform that had resilience with zero downtime and complete visibility over the cost model. We wanted to invest in a long-term IT solution that was bullet-proof, and that enabled us to easily adapt and scale to manage future growth.”
– Denise Walsh, Financial Controller, Mercers Agencies
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