News

Case study: a Venture Capital company

May 20, 2010

Our client case study are a venture capital funded investment company based in West London. When this client first approached NSE, they were a completely new start-up, with 20 users and absolutely no IT provision. They required a full IT solution – email, Microsoft Office applications and file storage - and their remote workers needed full access to their applications wherever they were.

NSE's involvement

More specifically, as a financial services company, they were concerned with security. NSE’s servers, security, hosting environment and network were independently audited and verified by their funder. Another major requirement was huge amounts of storage space for their document archive - their business model projected major growth over 3 years – requiring disk space of 54 terabytes.

NSE designed a tailoured solution using a dedicated private cloud comprising of 20 servers. For security, they connect to their cloud using a private leased line from their office in West London into one of our central London data centres.

Their environment includes hosted Microsoft Exchange for email with locally installed Microsoft Office on their PCs. All files are stored on their servers in the cloud. They have VPN (Virtual Private Network) access to their applications from any internet access point, anywhere in the world. All email and files are backed up overnight to a second NSE datacentre (in a different physical location) over a private leased line across the NSE backbone.

Telephony is also part of the NSE implementation. The client have desk phones providing full business telephony – and employees can be anywhere with an internet connection and their laptop and make and receive calls as if they were at their desk.

Their Service Level Agreement with NSE provides guarantees for server uptime, and disaster recovery. They also have a satellite office in Italy, connecting into the Cloud, using the same telephony with local Italian phone numbers.