Chiltern House Partnership

Business profile:
Chiltern House are an experienced firm of Independent Financial Advisers. Chiltern House pride themselves on building and maintaining long term relationships with clients who value the benefit of a holistic and professional approach to financial planning.

Requirement
Chiltern House Partnership appointed Riven Associates to support their existing IT systems. Riven Associates made recommendations to upgrade their existing Network & Infrastructure and identify Hardware and Software that should be upgraded to deliver a more reliable and secure IT system. Alongside this was the requirement to allow staff the ability to work remotely from the office location.

The Findings
Whilst the IT system in place had been sufficient when installed some time ago there were a number of areas that required attention:

Server

1. The server had no manufacturer backed warranty as it was a "Clone" unbranded server.
2. The server hardware had recently experienced hardware problems.
3. Server performance was beginning suffer due to the reliance on applications running on the server.

Backup System

1. The existing backup software was out of date and did not give the full benefits for backing up the Microsoft Exchange Email system compared to the newer backup software.

Remote Access

1. Chiltern House did not have any capability for accessing their systems remotely other than the standard Outlook Remote Access. There was a need for secure easy to use remote access to the network from any location.

Action

• Riven Associates conducted a Migration from the old Server to a new Windows Small Business Server 2003.
• Riven Associates installed a new Windows 2003 Terminal Server.
• Supplied and installed new fault tolerant Hewlett Packard Servers providing a more reliable (RAID) hardware platform giving the company a greater volume of disc storage for the future growth of company data. These was supplied with a 5 Year manufacturer warranty.
• Installed backup Software to ensure the system was completely backed up daily and could be restored quickly should the need arise. This also provides greater flexibility to restore individual emails quickly and easily.
• Configured Windows Terminal server with relevant user security, installation of company applications. Each user logon was tested to ensure the desktop experience was as near to users office PC's as possible.
• Installed a dedicated Hardware SSL-VPN appliance. This provided the customer with the functionality to utilise secure remote VPN access, whilst also providing a web based entry point to the network. This allowed staff access to the terminal services server from which there all the company applications could be used as if in the office.

Customers Comments:
Since we formed in 2002 we have become increasing reliant upon our IT system and now cannot function properly without it. Riven have supported us for the past two years and have provided us with a reliable service.  Having recently moved premises and with the need to expand our business the next obvious step was to set up remote access.  Because Riven have such a good understanding of our business needs they were able to source the correct solution for us and implement it with the minimum disruption.  The benefits of remote access are already apparent and we are delighted with the way the project has been delivered.