Steadfast Solutions Seamlessly Migrated High Street Underwriting To Microsoft 365 In Just Two Days
High Street Underwriting is an insurance underwriting agency. Representing offshore insurance companies, they resell policies for local Australian business clients. With a staff of 30 employees, this insurance agency is active and relies on its IT environment to stay productive and connected.
That’s why, a little over a year ago, they started working with Steadfast Solutions.
High Street Underwriting Needed A More Cost-Effective Partner In IT Support
Prior to working with Steadfast Solutions, High Street Underwriting was relying on support from another IT provider. Unfortunately, this provider was very expensive and didn’t deliver a commensurate quality of service.
“We were with another IT provider, and we weren’t happy with the pricing and product,” says Blair Whittle, Chief Operating Officer, High Street Underwriting.
This provider had them operating on a Citrix-based IT environment, which, in addition to being expensive, was difficult to keep optimized. The issue is that they were hosting an environment through a third-party — that means that every time there was an issue, Blair had to contact their IT support, their third party host, and Citrix in order to get it solved.
“It was very expensive, the cost was a big thing,” says Blair. “The service from that provider was a bit off. I had to go through two parties to get the solution fixed, which wasn’t ideal.”
That’s When High Street Underwriting Called Steadfast Solutions
Recognizing the need to consider alternatives for their IT support, Blair started researching their options in Australia. After spending just a bit of time on Google, he found Steadfast Solutions — and the rest is history.
“It was just through a few Google searches, I saw they were Brisbane based and Melbourne based,” says Blair. “I reached out, and from the moment I reached out the support has been top-quality.”
Steadfast Solutions Migrated High Street Underwriting To A More Cost-Effective Cloud Environment
Now with a more reliable IT partner on his side, Blair was ready to make further changes to High Street Underwriting’s IT environment.
“I was interested in Microsoft 365 with the cost advantages, but didn’t know how to integrate and move over, and I didn’t have the licenses, which Steadfast helped with,” says Blair.
As Blair knew, a cloud migration is a big process, and if it’s not handled correctly, it can be error-prone and overly expensive. An improperly managed migration can result in a range of negative consequences:
- During the transition, the business could permanently lose key data with no backup or redundancies to replace it.
- The migration, already expensive, could take longer than expected and add additional downtime to the staff’s work life.
- Once it is finally installed and launched, the platform is overly complicated and difficult to learn, leading to more downtime for the staff.
That’s why High Street Underwriting relied on Steadfast Solutions to handle the process, which was even faster and more seamless than they expected.
“It was actually very impressive,” says Blair. “I was expecting a lot more delays, but they got it done in a weekend. I got back Monday and it was pretty much all done. It was relatively seamless.”
Today, High Street Underwriting is spending less on IT than they were a year ago, and enjoying a far more robust and reliable IT environment. Their staff uses Microsoft Teams to communicate both among themselves and with business contacts throughout Australia and around the world.