Successful Migration to Cloud Services for Northamptonshire SME

About Impact Recruitment

Founded in 2002, Impact Recruitment Services prides itself on being different from other agencies. The company lives by its core principles every day, ensuring that every client and candidate experience is positive and consistent with the Impact values. Impact supplies permanent and technical staff to the commercial, industrial, supply chain and technical and engineering sectors and is a rapidly growing business, with turnover increasingly rapidly thanks to the securing of two major new clients. Impact has two main offices in Northampton and Wellingborough, and has account managers embedded with a number of major clients.

Successful migration to Microsoft 365 for Northamptonshire SME

Fuse CS worked Impact Recruitment on a multi-stage project to revolutionise the company’s IT provision and support. The project started in 2018 with a migration from an on-premises server and was completed in only a few months, despite the scale of the project. The relationship continues today with Fuse providing daily IT management.  

Audit and discovery phase 

As with every client, Fuse’s team conducted a full audit of Impact’s existing IT provision. It was clear that improvements were essential – staff were using a mixture of operating systems and software based on when the computer had been bought, not what the user needed. This made it difficult when new staff joined as they were not able to be trained on the same software as the rest of the team and made security levels inconsistent.  

Everything was based on site with no external access, and the issues brought by single point failure were exacerbated by problems with downtime and slow responsiveness from Impact’s previous IT provider. Impact Recruitment was based in two offices, one in Northampton and one in Wellingborough. The two separate sites and servers meant that sharing information efficiently was difficult. The account management teams in particular, struggled with updating spreadsheets they shared across the two sites and faced constant issues with multiple versions of important payroll documents. This was also a problem for the staff who worked onsite with clients; they relied on an external hard drive that they updated when they went back to the office, in order to access the documents they needed.  

Furthermore, there was a lack of compliance with licenses and an over-paying for packages that Impact either did not need or were not making the most of. 

Moving from ‘traditional’ IT to cloud computing 

The move to cloud computing ensured that every member of the team had the latest version of their software packages, operating system and applications, regardless of what device they were using. This meant that if a machine breaks, is lost, or stolen, another one can be brought out of a box and be used immediately without having to wait for it to be personalised to the user. Migrating data to cloud computing was accompanied by the introduction of new security features and a single sign-on for a user, regardless of whether they were using a computer, tablet or smartphone. With Fuse’s help, Impact moved more staff over to laptops and introduced multi-factor authentication to protect devices users.  

The move to SharePoint enabled several account managers to work on payroll spreadsheets simultaneously without incorrect duplicates being created. This saved time and supported a more efficient start to the weekly payroll process.  

Collaboration across the two offices was made more efficient and fostered an improvement in relationships. This, and the move to laptops, eventually led to the teams choosing to spend a day a week at the other site so they could get to know each other better. With cloud computing, there was no logistical issues over accessing what they needed to do their job from a different site. This also had a positive impact on the client onsite staff who no longer needed to update an external hard drive and could use a laptop each instead of sharing a desktop computer.  

When the global pandemic in 2020 forced Impact to work from home, the whole company was already set-up to work remotely, and consequently experienced very little disruption to their processes. This success has given them a much stronger position among competitors despite the economic uncertainty post-pandemic.  

Securing the future of an SME with managed IT services 

Thanks to Fuse, Impact’s team is now working more efficiently. Staff who work on-site at clients can now access all their data and documents as they would in the office and still collaborate with their teammates. New solutions and applications are being introduced in a controlled manner when it is appropriate to do so, and Fuse is now helping to improve Impact's processes.  

For example, as the team became more remote, the need for mobile smartphones was recognised. Staff wanted to be able to securely message their workers and clients, get emails and access worker registers from their phones. Fuse implemented managed mobile phone policies, installing Office365 and making it easy for staff to access what they needed on the move. 

The move to cloud computing has freed Impact Recruitment from location-based working and enabled them to thrive through access from anywhere and an improved culture of collaboration and innovation.