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Arbutus Properties is a small but nimble boutique real estate developer with experience in residential, commercial, resort, and hotel planning and development. Working in Western Canada and the U.S., their focus has been on finding ‘diamonds in the rough’ in overlooked neighbourhood, communities, and cities. They understand the profound and lasting effect that real estate has on families, neighbourhood, and communities.
Not only did Arbutus’ existing on-site servers make remote access harder, but the lack of redundancy in their systems meant that the prospect of downtime in case of hardware failure or other disaster was a real possibility. Compounding this were ageing workstations that were not compatible with new systems. While Arbutus was keen to move as much of their IT as possible to the cloud to remove the dependency on the equipment in their office, the older workstations added an extra hurdle.
Dyrand Systems’ answer was to migrate their systems to the cloud in stages. Initially, Arbutus’ email was moved from their on-premise server to Office 365, then all workstations were upgraded to newer hardware and the latest operating system. Finally, all data was moved to SharePoint and OneDrive. During the project, Arbutus demonstrated their confidence in Dyrand Systems by asking them to assume the management of their entire IT infrastructure. A subsequent project has seen Dyrand Systems move and upgrades much of their network IT during Arbutus’ office relocation—a difficult task made much simpler because their systems are now in the cloud.
The results are exactly what Arbutus Properties was looking for. Most of their systems have now been migrated to the cloud, with both email and data moved to Office 365. This configuration not only enables simpler access to their data, but it’s also much more secure while providing the all-important redundancy that they desired.
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