Johannesburg, 19 Oct 2020
Financial planning company Private Wealth Management (PWM) has migrated to the cloud with Microsoft Azure and Office 365. Implemented by Netsurit, the solution takes PWM’s IT infrastructure to the next level, providing a modern business development platform and ensuring secure cloud storage for the company’s data.
The solution leverages Microsoft 365 core products and features to securely enhance workplace productivity and drive innovation for PWM. The move has also enabled PWM to focus on its core business, which is lifestyle financial planning.
“Our previous IT set-up was complex and fragmented, and support was often an issue that had an impact on our business,” says Dirk Wolfaardt, Chief Operations Officer at PWM. “We wanted a new IT infrastructure that would take the business into the future, and improve our operations and efficiencies. In addition, we wanted to understand actual IT costs and have the ability to monitor our systems and usage.”
The implementation could not have come at a better time, he says. “It has changed the way we operate, as well as our business model, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic affected the entire world. Because the solution is cloud-based, PWM was able to adopt Microsoft Teams and OneDrive along with SharePoint Online overnight, to allow our business to function when work from home (WFH) became the new normal. Our end-users instantaneously had access to relevant data and we were able to collaborate with colleagues and clients using Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise, the latest Office apps for PC (such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and others), and a full suite of online services for e-mail, file storage, collaboration, meetings and more.”
PWM engaged with Netsurit in July 2019, and the solution went live in March 2020. When you outsource your business needs to a dedicated partner, Wolfaardt says, you benefit from their industry expertise. “We chose to work with Netsurit because the team has proved time and again to be committed and trustworthy. They also have the IT capability to support PWM whenever we call on them.”
One of PWM’s requirements was that there were to be no servers onsite, except for the firewall, network switches, wireless access points and printers. This has revolutionised its operating model and assisted greatly during the lockdown. Communication platform Microsoft Teams provided staff with the flexibility to meet with clients and continue to take care of their financial needs.
The complex and secure set-up meant getting e-mail migrated out of more than one on-premises mail system was challenging. “Parallel to this, Netsurit also enabled the Mimecast Security solution,” says Patrick Schneider, Account Executive at Netsurit. “This was to ultimately help keep users and data safe by providing protection against spam and viruses, malware and impersonation attempts, as well as data leaks. Users have also been empowered with security awareness training to reduce the risk of human error.”
Netsurit has standardised all Windows 10 Enterprise Operating systems to be BitLocker protected and are able to roll-out machines to the business using Windows Autopilot managed through Microsoft Intune. Azure Active Directory Premium (AADP) allowed Netsurit to enable single sign-on, password self-service capability for end-users as well as multi-factor authentication.
The Netsurit Security Operations Centre (NSOC) takes care of all the cloud security for Private Wealth Management, including advanced threat analytics (ATA) or Azure Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), Azure Information Protection (AIP) OMS (Operations Management Suite) and Log Analytics.
“It has been an exciting journey as we design, build and run our business’s IT with the strategic guidance of Netsurit to assist us in this digital transformation,” says Wolfaardt. “We highly recommend Netsurit to assist your business with all things IT.”
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