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Acnode recently migrated one of our long standing clients, Prism consultants, from the traditional onsite server environment to a fully cloud based solution using Microsoft 365 as a solution.

This migration enabled the staff of Prism Consultants (a leading insurance brokerage with offices in Bellville, Hermanus, and Gansbaai) to easily and seamlessly connect to business critical services. Connections can be made from anywhere and from any device, such as desktops, laptops and mobile / cell phones, without the need for cumbersome VPN client dial ups.

Microsoft 365 is a subscription based offering that includes services such as Exchange Online, Onedrive, Sharepoint, Azure active directory and Teams.

Core Services that were migrated to the Microsoft 365 from cloud were:

• Onsite active directory to Azure active directory.
• Exchange (email) onsite to Exchange online.
• File and document sharing and collaboration to OneDrive

Migrating to Microsoft 365 also enabled Prism Consultants to make use of Microsoft Teams for collaboration.

Whilst a hybrid deployment is possible (both onsite and cloud), the decision was made to completely discontinue the legacy onsite server infrastructure.

This decision was partly fuelled by the fact that South Africa's electricity supply is in a continuous state of load shedding. Discontinuing the onsite Server infrastructure enabled us to lessen the load on Prism's backup power reserves at their Head office in Bellville.

To quote Mr. Johan Holtzhausen, Managing Director of Prism Consultants:

"Acnode has been instrumental in our strategic ICT goals since they started their engagement with us in 2006. Their valuable advice, prompt and efficient service have helped us to realise business goals.

The ability to enable call recordings on the VoIP PABX phone system ensures that Prism's compliance requirements are met."

Acnode recently started offering Barracuda as the service of choice for backing up the Micorosft 365 environment. Barracuda offers a fully cloud based backup solution for the office365 environment. This along with the award winning avast antivirus (cloud managed), enables us to support and manage Prism's backup, antivirus and patching requirements from the cloud.

Both these products are on offer though AvertITD as the appointed distributor for South Africa for these products.