About Northwest Investments(NWI)
Northwest Investments Pty Ltd (NWI) owns and operates a number of Quick Service Restaurants throughout Australia. NWI have a head office located in Melbourne and run a Payroll system called Accrivia.
Drivers to the Cloud
NWI was running an old SBS server in their head office location. The hardware was end of life and the operating system and operating environment were no longer supported. Connectivity for remote staff was also an issue with store managers needing to log into the central system to submit data.
Accrivia (Payroll system) is a WOLK partner and always recommend AWS and WOLK as their preferred cloud offering. This is where NWI and WOLK started their journey to the cloud. NWI wanted a system that was up to date, easy to use and allowed their remote staff better access to their systems.
“We needed to replace our aging hardware and considered several solutions and providers, the recommendation from Accrivia and the fact that WOLK supply services for a number of other similar franchisees made the decision easy” said Diana Earp, NWI.
Why Amazon Web Services (AWS)
NWI needed to replace their old server infrastructure and decided that cloud was the answer. As always, using a proven system is the easiest route to guaranteed success and WOLK had proven that it can provide solutions to other Accrivia customers, hosted on AWS.
Being the world’s biggest and most reliable public cloud provider, moving to AWS gave NWI a lot of certainty that their data would be safe. There would not be capacity or speed issues and all staff would have the same experience when using shared company resources.
WOLK implemented a new firewall appliance with failover to 4g at the NWI head office, which meant that the normal blocker of “what if my internet goes down” was negated very easily.
The Benefits of Working with AWS and WOLK Technology – an AWS Advanced consulting partner and “Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows” Solution Provider
NWI had been working with another Managed Service Provider (MSP) who made things a lot easier for WOLK to transition NWI to the cloud – often incumbent providers try and make things as difficult as possible. Moving all of NWI’s IT resources to WOLK meant that WOLK turned into their single point of contact for all their IT needs.
There was no longer a need for a VPN or insecure RDP connections. WOLK implemented an Amazon Workspaces solution which meant that everyone had access to everything they needed to do their job and meant that the store managers could be more efficient.
WOLK provided a very straightforward solution, which includes the EUC environment, File shares, Office applications, Payroll system and their Legacy apps. With a baseline cost, every additional user cost can be easily calculated to allow for planning.
Doing a client onboarding using a AWS Well Architected Review allows us to know a lot more about our clients than what we otherwise would have, which inevitably gives the customer a more robust and secure solution.
Most of the office-based staff now work from home and only occasionally go into the office. This is only possible because staff can now work from home with the same efficiency as working from the office, even if using BYOD home grade equipment. The ease of switching from office based to remote working is one of the key advantages to having a cloud native end user compute solution.