Jefferson Sheard

Jefferson Sheard Architects is a specialist architects that works primarily with education, travel, healthcare, retail and residential organisations. After they became dissatisfied with their incumbent provider, ASK4 Solutions were approached in 2018 to take over the management of a range of IT services. Priding themselves on their high levels of service and professionalism, they needed an IT infrastructure and support across 4 UK offices to enable them to meet and exceed the expectations of their clients.

JSA were looking to modernise their on-premises infrastructure across 4 sites but at the time were not looking to move towards cloud services due to the way that the company operates and the amount of data they needed to store long-term. 

Over the course of the project, we helped move them to a much more suitable set of solutions that not only upgraded their current systems, but helped them transition to more secure, flexible and reliable ways of working. Solutions included: 

• Virtualised server infrastructure using Hyper-V 
• Veeam backup and replication to provide backup which follows the 3-2-1 principles for disaster recovery 
• Took over support of their existing network infrastructure and replaced some of the networking equipment as part of ongoing upgrades 
• Upgrades across the business to a better AV product 
• General desktop support 

Since the initial project, we have also taken them through Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus qualifications. 

The initial on-boarding process was reasonably straight forward however a lot of work needed to be done to get JSA to a place where ASK4 Solutions could begin to upgrade the infrastructure. 

The infrastructure ASK4 Solutions inherited was not in a good state – the domain was set up very badly and there were lots of replication issues between sites which was causing a lot of issues. This needed some very careful unpicking to allow us to upgrade servers to the proposed solution. Their existing backup solution had generated a huge amount extraneous data which needed sorting and reviewing too. 

Another challenge for ASK4 Solutions was the speed at which we had to take over support. We had just a week or two to gather information to be able to commence the work – a process which would normally take much longer before we would start support. Due to our ability to adapt to the needs of JSA, we were able to navigate these issues and ensure that the business could continue to work as usual while we made important upgrades to their IT infrastructure. 

“Moving to ASK4 for our IT support was a quick, painless task and we were guided throughout. One positive for us is that ASK4 have taken the time to get to know our company, how we work and what we do, providing us with solutions to make us more efficient and adaptable to changing situations. The team are professional, helpful and nothing is too much trouble."

Chris Race
Regional Director & Healthcare Lead