28 March 2014

JMC's support team

Accountancy and tax advice firm Booth Ainsworth LLP is responsible for the payroll of more than 600 businesses and 8,000 employees across the northwest. The Stockport-based organisation is a BACS Approved Bureau and must therefore meet the payment organisation’s strict compliance requirements to be able to pay clients’ employees directly. Comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) criteria must be met to achieve this status. But the firm wanted to take this a step further, and decided to upgrade its DR systems and support, putting high-performing IT at the forefront of its priorities.

Gary Cook, partner and head of professional practices at Booth Ainsworth, says: “There are so many horror stories of organisations that don’t understand the importance of business continuity and disaster recovery, but we see this as an extension of our due diligence to our customers.”

Working with JMC IT, its longstanding partner, the firm deployed live replication technology at its DR site. A radio link and broadband backup were installed, providing Booth Ainsworth with resilient access to the internet should there be any failure to its primary connection. Data is backed up overnight and mirrored in two separate, secure data centres, protecting vital information against any potential disasters.

In addition, JMC’s support team is providing an increased level of active system monitoring and IT support to ensure that Booth Ainsworth’s systems offer sustained high performance. This proactive approach to support means that any IT issues can be resolved, often well before they impact on the business. “We have amazingly little downtime on our systems, which is very important to a business where time is money,” says Cook. “If we do encounter any problems, JMC gets us back to normal, usually within as little as 15-20 minutes.”