How Aquilatec's IT Solutions Saved The Day!
Back in February 2020, Covid 19 were not two words which everyone used daily. News coming from China and then Italy was starting to raise eyebrows, but most people and businesses in the UK felt relatively safe. This gradually started to change as the days ticked by.
During the start of March, it looked increasingly likely that the UK would follow the likes of China, Italy, Spain and France by locking down. Knowing our customers have traditionally been mainly office based and that some intentionally had no remote working facilities, the team at Aquilatec in London started to suspect that many businesses simply weren’t preparing for the inevitable closure of their offices. We knew it was our job to get our clients ready, quickly, with Aquilatec’s IT support and services.
Many of our clients were indeed well prepared as they had heeded previous IT Support and services and had invested in Remote Desktop solutions, VoIP telephony and so on. For these customers, we just simply needed to make sure that all their staff were aware of how to access systems remotely – a simple guide that was sent out. They were ready to hit the ground running and there was no further concern.
But for other customers; those who had previously had an intentional policy of no remote working, we needed to quickly come up with alternate IT technical support and solutions. We sent out urgent messages to the key stakeholders at each of our clients and encouraged engagement re their upcoming plans, and how we could make their IT Services and systems work for them, while their staff were unable to travel into their offices.
A few short weeks is generally not considered enough time to design and implement new Business IT Solutions. But time was short and IT support solutions were very much required. We knew that for our customers to survive lockdown, computers simply couldn’t say no, so we had our team of IT support technicians ready to help.
The general theme we heard from a number of these less prepared clients was that they simply had to have staff sitting at desks accessing the machines and servers inside their offices, in order to fulfil their roles. Due to the nature of the applications in use, we knew they wouldn’t work well or at all over a VPN, so we discussed amongst ourselves and came up with a solution, based on the Remote Support tools that our London and Cape Town based IT Technicians use on a daily basis in order to support client’s PCs (and Macs) from afar.
We discussed with our vendor, SolarWinds MSP, and came back with a solution whereby we could grant clients access to their PCs, via a web interface, from any location. All access to be secured with Two Factor Authentication and backed with fully reportable audit logs so that managers could see which of their staff had accessed which PCs back in their office.
A clear week before lockdown, we had the majority of our clients setup and able to work remotely. Our own staff had already decamped to setup offices in their homes and customers were surprised that we were answering their calls exactly as normal, ready to be locked down and carry on providing the same levels of IT support and services, despite being outside our own office. Aquilatec was able to do this because our internal and support systems are entirely cloud based, as are our phones. Aquilatec had been prepared for this for years, and this is what enabled us to get our clients ready for lockdown too.
The tools we use day in and day out to run our business and support our clients are all from industry leaders in their fields and these are what enable our IT Technicians to provide smart and efficient IT Support and Services and our projects team to implement and deliver effective Business IT Solutions.
Aquilatec can be your IT solution provider today! If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your business, please drop us a line at hello@aquilatec.co.ukor call 020 8342 5015 for all your IT support and services.