How ESP’s intelligent IT support approach optimised data flow between offices and improved productivity and billings.

ESP has been supplying IT to reidwilliams since the early 90's. reidwilliams are a firm of Chartered Accountants and Business Advisors offering tailored tax solutions and creative planning skills. They have their head office in Reading, regional offices spread through southern England, and a highly mobile workforce of senior consultants which utilised a peer to peer network in reidwilliams’ Reading headquarters giving them the ability to share printers and data.

Unfortunately, in keeping with this type of installation, work had to be laboriously and inefficiently transferred to their regional offices manually and their consultants could not access information either when on a client’s site or from their home offices. This situation meant that much of their time was either wasted in travelling or was unchargeable.

When reidwilliams purchased another accountancy practice, it had to tackle the problems of distributed locations, document version control and of interfacing varied computer systems.

ESP’s solution was to centrally house all of the data and applications – and for users in other offices to remotely access these using Terminal Services and broadband connections. This would not only introduce consistency between the offices but would allow a single backup to be run each night and for security and virus protection to be controlled from one point.

By establishing virtual private networks between the sites and utilising state of the art data encryption, the availability, integrity and flow of data was maximised and the security risk of using the open internet virtually eliminated.