Hollywood Monster

Overview

Hollywood Monster is a busy, forward thinking business. In providing a range of clients and industries with high quality graphics and digitally printed products, technology is a key focus. The business was embracing the changing times and they were looking to modernise their internal systems and introduce new ways of working to help them to stand out in a competitive marketplace.

When the firm approached us they had several specific priorities and business challenges that they wanted to address:

• Limited data storage – they needed to find more space for the huge number images and working files generated.
• Obsolete hardware – they were operating a legacy network over 5 years out of date, was expensive and not up to the task of delivering the information they needed efficiently.
• Productivity – Poor VPN, wifi and mobile access was creating time consuming tasks and holding them back.
• Limited helpdesk support – As a 24/7 business they needed IT support to be quick and proactive. Their existing IT company was hard to reach in an emergency and didn’t appreciate their specific issues or anticipate business need.

They wanted to work with a proactive IT company that was going to take all these challenges into account and find a solution that would help them deal with their storage, back up, disaster recovery and connectivity issues.

Our Solution

Our primary task was to understand exactly how Hollywood Monster exchanged data within the business between the members of their large team and with their customers.

They deal with extremely large files on a daily so we needed to take storage and networking into account along with their processes for backing up and disaster recovery. In addition, their diverse working environment, with staff working across Macs, PCs and with Linux lead us to the conclusion that migrating them over to Office 365 and the cloud would be the way forward.

We were confident that the amount of standard storage space available with Office 365 was sufficient to keep up with their growing data volumes, while automatic back-ups would give them the peace of mind that their data was secure. In moving to the cloud they would have full external access to their applications and systems and by moving their email server onto Office 365 they would have the flexibility to refresh or upgrade whenever they needed to. But the major benefit of moving to Office 365 was that it would give them the flexibility to gain access to their data whenever and wherever they needed it.

At Dragon IS we plan our migration projects to be minimally invasive to the business with a rigorous planning and preparation process starting up to three or four months in advance. We get to understand all the relationships between all the applications before the migration and line everything up to culminate in a very specific switch over point and we may run systems in tandem for a time so we can run and change over system by system over a period of a month.