IT Support & Cloud Migration

A multi-branch estate agency with six offices across Berkshire and North Hampshire was struggling with an IT setup that had not kept pace with the growth of the business. Their infrastructure was built around two aging on-premise servers housed in the head office, running Windows Server 2012 R2 with no redundancy and no formal disaster recovery plan. If those servers failed, all six branches would lose access to their property management system, email, and shared files. The previous IT support provider operated on a reactive, break-fix basis with average response times of four hours or more - completely inadequate for a business where missed calls and system downtime directly translate to lost property sales and lettings revenue. Staff frequently experienced slow file access from remote branches due to reliance on a site-to-site VPN, and the lack of remote working capability meant agents could not access systems when out of the office at property viewings. With plans to open two additional branches in the coming year, leadership recognised they needed both a modern infrastructure and a reliable IT support partner to underpin their expansion.

Coffee Cup Solutions was engaged to deliver both a full cloud migration and ongoing managed IT support. The project was carried out over a four-week period, carefully scheduled around the business cycle to avoid disrupting peak viewing seasons. We began with a thorough infrastructure audit, documenting every server role, application dependency, user account, and network configuration across all six sites. We then designed a cloud-first architecture on Microsoft Azure, provisioning virtual machines to host their property management application, migrating file shares to SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, and deploying Exchange Online as part of a Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription. Azure Site Recovery was configured to provide automated disaster recovery with a recovery time objective of under one hour. We replaced aging network switches and firewalls at each branch with managed Ubiquiti equipment, establishing reliable and secure connectivity. Each branch was connected via Azure networking, replacing the fragile VPN tunnels with a more resilient configuration. The migration itself was performed over a weekend, with our team on-site at the head office and available remotely for all branches. By Monday morning, all six offices were running entirely from the cloud. Simultaneously, we onboarded the company onto our managed IT support service, providing access to our helpdesk with its sub-15-second average response time, proactive monitoring of all devices and cloud services, automated patch management, and regular technology reviews with the business owners.