The Carrwood Group centralises its IT infrastructure with the help of Zen Internet
The Carrwood Group is one of the top 30 Independent Financial Advice (IFA) businesses in the UK. It is one of the largest distributors of financial services to accountancy firms and offers specialist advice in all areas of financial services. Carrwood's clients are advised via direct associations with accountancy and legal practices and it provides the practices with a dedicated in-house team.
Supporting growth
In order to become one of the top 30 IFAs in the UK, Carrwood needed to increase both its number of employees and offices. It also needed a reliable, cost effective network infrastructure that could support this growth. The Carrwood Group first became aware of Internet Service Provider, Zen Internet, when its Manchester-based accountancy partner, Ford Campbell, opened its second office in Leeds. The need for these two offices to be linked to the same network was obvious, but unrealistic due to the excessive cost of using the traditional method of leased lines. Zen replaced the company's ISDN-based Internet access with two ADSL services, thus allowing these two offices to be interlinked over a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection.
We chose Zen because of its excellent reputation and also the fact that it is based relatively locally. Unlike many other ISPs Zen appeared to be small enough to care yet big enough to cope and were able to provide customer service with a personal touch.
said Christian Waller, Carrwood Group IT manager.
He continued:
Linking these two offices with ADSL from Zen Internet saved us a fortune compared to the cost equivalent of leased lines. The fact that ADSL gives us the bandwidth once only available through leased lines at a fraction of the cost is a real bonus for the company.
In October 2003, Carrwood took over a large IFA organisation and grew from having just two offices to 22 with 110 staff virtually overnight. The IT infrastructure in these extra offices was poor and the pressure was on for Carrwood to link all of the sites back into its head office in Manchester to enable staff to access the back office database, electronic research tools and e-mail, (all housed centrally on servers in Manchester), and in addition have fast and reliable access to the Web. The various sites are based throughout the UK, as far south as Exeter, and as far west as Newry in Northern Ireland.
Zen's customer and technical support proved itself to be excellent and its service offering was perfectly tailored to our needs. We hope to continue our working relationship with Zen and are always interested to hear about new offerings from the company,
explained Christian.
At each site Zen provided a managed Draytek Router connected to a 512Kbps ADSL line that all connect via Virtual Private Network (VPN) through a 2Mbps Zen Local Area Network (LAN) extension to a central Firebox 1000 firewall. Although Carrwood only required 2Mbps in terms of bandwidth, Zen advised that it would be more cost effective to install a 10Mb LAN extension, but restrict the bandwidth to 2 Mb initially. This makes it a full scalable solution and gives the ability to easily upgrade the bandwidth at any time in the future.
Zen Network Solutions (a division of Zen Internet) configure and administer all the VPN tunnels, and ensure the central network is securely protected and updated at regular intervals. Zen supports the majority of Carrwood's firewalls and also looks after the company's Internet security.
With all offices now linking directly to head office, another benefit to Carrwood's IT department was that any minor IT problems could be fixed remotely using PC remote control software. This saves the company both time and money as the IT department no longer needs to visit the various office locations to fix the majority of minor problems.
Carrwood's new network infrastructure has also allowed a number of staff members to work from home by simply installing a Zen ADSL service and configuring a secure VPN connection back to head office.
ADSL now allows all 22 of our offices and six home workers to connect securely to our head office. The low cost and ease and speed of set up of Zen's solution means that there are few barriers to expanding the company to new offices. We now have no technical barriers to the continual growth and success of the Carrwood Group,
said Christian.
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