When we took the decision to outsource, we spoke to a number of potential suppliers, but Daisy stood out from the start with their professionalism, knowledge and vision. This, and more, has been borne out in the years we’ve been working with them. The platform is stable, secure, reliable and performant, while the people are experienced, knowledgeable and good to work with. As we start to look at our next generation platform, Daisy’s vision, expertise and commitment remains outstanding.
Simon Tombs – MD, Monahans
The Background
Monahans is one of the leading firms of chartered accountants and business advisors in the west of England, serving businesses in local communities and beyond.
Offering a range of specialised services that include Corporate Finance, Tax Consultancy, Audit, Business Recovery and Insolvency, Digital Cloud Accounting, Payroll, HR Services and Probate. Monahans has the experience to understand and anticipate needs, provide insights, and support clients with reassuring professional expertise in a constantly evolving, challenging business world. Its teams of professionals operate from offices in Bath, Chippenham, Frome, Glastonbury, Swindon, Trowbridge and Taunton.
As chartered accountants, Monahans sell their skills in units of billable time, which need to be precisely accounted for, this requires performant, resilient, and secure IT services to support its business activities and staff.
The Challenge
To deliver the efficient service clients expect, Monahans needs a reliable, high performance and secure IT solution.
Prior to working with Daisy, the firm’s core technology was housed in one of its own offices and managed by a third-party service provider. In 2012, as part of its newly defined IT strategy, Monahans sought a new IT partner that could host their core infrastructure in a highly available way through an off-site data centre. This would allow for a fully-managed and monitored IT environment, with the ability to upgrade the entire application stack easily to the latest available versions while supporting staff with any IT issues.
As well as removing Monahan’s IT dependency from its own premises, the solution needed to facilitate both mobile working and IT Disaster Recovery (ITDR) – with special focus on providing access if the firm’s business premises were ever compromised.
The Solution
Now on its third generation, Monahan’s consume IaaS cloud services hosted in Daisy’s state-of-the-art data centres, with their client data secured and archived in a geographically separate location together with SaaS services for specific industry and office applications.
The use of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) ensures that all confidential data remains in the data centre, while secure remote access (complete with Multi Factor Authentication) enables both mobile working and effective IT Disaster Recovery. The legacy telephony system was replaced post covid and Monahans are now utilise the functionality of Microsoft Teams with Daisy’s Direct2Teams delivering cost effective and resilient connectivity.
Daisy re-designed the Monahans’ Wide Area Network, providing improved connectivity with an MPLS WAN solution utilising its own core network. As well as being more cost-effective, the solution offers guaranteed class
and quality of service to ensure that virtual desktop and voice traffic are prioritised.
In addition to all this, Daisy operates a service desk to support all of Monahans’ IT users, while proactively monitoring and managing the application platforms and the user experience. The team also provides strategic support to help the firm drive innovation and challenge established thinking.
The Result
Today, Monahans benefits from a resilient, accessible, and high-performance IT environment which delivers a highly available application and voice service – allowing all staff to provide a premium quality service to their clients. The environment continues to evolve with greater adoption of cloud services that will further enhance the flexibility and scalability to support business growth.
