McKenzies Accountants

CLOUD AND IT SERVICES FOR SURREY COMPANY

Akita has been providing IT services to McKenzies’ Oxted offices since 2010.

Akita is a Surrey IT services and support provider. McKenzies were attracted to the proactive nature of our approach and the scale of our support team.

McKenzies is a well-established firm recognised as specialists in its chosen areas of accountancy. With a caring, professional and dedicated team, McKenzies are committed to providing the best possible service to their commercial and private clients.

As a thriving and forward-looking company, they are particularly keen to enhance their IT systems where legitimate and cost-effective improvements can be identified. As a provider of Surrey IT services, Akita has been able to help them transform their IT infrastructure.

Operating multiple servers which were approaching end-of-life, Akita virtualized the servers to provide McKenzies with their own cloud computing infrastructure. Moving the server to the cloud gave a number of key benefits, not least was improved disaster recovery safeguards and more reliable infrastructure.

Due to their McKenzies satisfaction with the virtualization outcomes and the ongoing IT support, Akita moved all of their users over to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). VDIs gives them the benefit to work from any location (on or off-site) whilst always having access to their own personal desktop. In addition, this process also prolongs the life of their existing workstations, reducing the long-term cost of desktop replacements.

Cloud computing is an increasingly-accepted form of corporate computing and there is far more acceptance of its role amongst previously sceptical IT managers. The improvements in broadband speeds, as well as the security enhancements, have made cloud computing a key component of future IT system planning.

Of course, there are different scales of cloud adoption. For many companies, it may be limited to offsite backup to or a small number of hosted email mailboxes. Others are more willing to adopt a complete cloud computing system with hosted servers and even hosted VoIP telephone systems.

For McKenzies, the decision to create their own private cloud was preferred as opposed to utilising our datacentre. Compared to traditional server computing, it gave significant service enhancements and cost benefits as opposed to replacing multiple servers, whilst providing a superior disaster recovery solution. This infrastructure is supported by Akita’s responsive IT support team to ensure that they do not suffer from unnecessary and unwanted downtime.