Strengthening Backup Resilience & Enabling Secure Remote Working
The Context
Engineering and manufacturing organisations operating across global markets depend heavily on reliable systems, secure data protection, and consistent access to business platforms. As companies grow, legacy IT solutions that were once sufficient can quickly become barriers to productivity and resilience.
This case centres on a UK-based engineering solutions provider delivering bespoke equipment design, manufacturing, and hire services across sectors including marine, renewable energy, oil and gas, and defence. With operations supporting international projects, system availability and data protection were critical to daily operations.
Over time, however, the organisation’s IT environment had remained largely unchanged. Core infrastructure and backup systems were more than a decade old and had not evolved alongside the business’s growth, leading to performance issues, increasing operational risk, and declining user confidence in IT services.
We were engaged to modernise backup infrastructure, stabilise server performance, and improve secure access for staff — shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic introduced an urgent requirement for remote working.
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The Challenge
A review of the existing environment identified several critical risks.
Backup storage had reached capacity limits, raising concerns about whether systems could be recovered successfully during a disaster recovery scenario. At the same time, insufficient disk space on the virtual host caused servers to freeze and crash intermittently, disrupting day-to-day operations.
Confidence in the existing IT provision had declined, as longstanding technical issues remained unresolved and support responsiveness did not meet business needs.
Remote access presented an additional challenge. VPN connectivity relied on a basic, single-user solution that was unreliable and unsuitable for a growing workforce. When national lockdown measures were introduced, enabling secure remote access for staff quickly became a business-critical priority.
The organisation required a solution that would:
- Improve backup reliability and disaster recovery readiness
- Increase infrastructure capacity and stability
- Protect critical engineering data and applications
- Enable secure remote working for the wider workforce
- Restore confidence through proactive IT management
The Solution
Following a full infrastructure assessment, we implemented a phased approach focused on resilience, performance, and operational continuity.
Modernising Backup & Disaster Recovery
The existing backup environment was redesigned and upgraded with a modern business continuity solution capable of protecting servers and critical data across the organisation.
The new platform enabled:
- Point-in-time data recovery
- Protection against ransomware, accidental deletion, and system failure
- Replication of server images to secure cloud infrastructure
- Rapid virtualisation of servers locally or in the cloud during an outage
This ensured the business could recover quickly in a disaster scenario with minimal downtime or data loss.
Improving Infrastructure Performance
Additional storage capacity was introduced to the virtual host environment, allowing servers to operate efficiently without resource constraints. This eliminated persistent freezing and crashing issues and restored stability across core business systems.
Backup processes were also extended to protect specialist engineering data platforms, ensuring critical project information was consistently secured.
Enabling Secure Remote Working
In response to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, secure remote access was rapidly deployed using enterprise-grade firewall and VPN technology.
This provided:
- Secure, high-speed remote access for staff
- Centralised visibility and management of network activity
- Advanced threat protection at the network edge
- Application-level control to prioritise business-critical traffic
Laptops were provisioned and configured to allow employees to work safely from home while maintaining access to internal systems and specialised software.
The Results
The organisation experienced immediate improvements in performance, reliability, and user confidence following implementation.
Key outcomes included:
- Stable server performance with eliminated freezing and crash issues
- Reliable, fully tested backup and disaster recovery capabilities
- Secure remote working successfully deployed for staff during national lockdowns
- Reduced operational risk through modernised infrastructure and proactive monitoring
- Increased productivity as system disruptions were removed
Perhaps most importantly, the relationship between the business and its IT provider fundamentally changed. Staff now benefit from responsive support and proactive system management, with potential issues identified and resolved before affecting end users.
The organisation now operates with confidence that its systems, data, and workforce can remain operational even during unexpected disruption — supported by a structured, long-term approach to IT management.
“We have complete trust in our IT support provider. Their recommendations have kept us on the right track and significantly improved our business from the start of the partnership. The team consistently delivers professionalism and support whenever we need assistance.”
— Operations Director
