Leisure Industry

 

Background

Our client run pleasure cruises all around the UK and following the new GDPR guidelines wanted to review how they handle customer information. They wanted to ensure they were adopting best practice when it came to data handling and also to examine if their current IT infrastructure was up to the task.

 

Challenges

 

Like a number of businesses the IT infrastructure that existed wasn’t as a result of a carefully planned strategy but more of a patchwork setup as different situations arose.

Email issues – their email system was hosted alongside their web server which caused issues with storage limitations for each user

Data Backup – back up of the data from the customer booking system was done periodically and saved to a hard drive which was kept on site.

Document Storage – employees had difficulty with sharing files and storing documents in a manner where there was any form of document control

Server security –  the website and booking applications were believed to be potential concerns for breach of security

 

Solution

After review BCS recommended a series of solutions that not only ensured compliance but also increased productivity and flexibility among the staff.

Microsoft Office365 Business Premium was deployed in the first instance to all the main staff (approx. 10 users). The benefits of this were two-fold – with a healthy 50Gb storage for each user the storage limitation issue per user was taken care of. The inclusion of Sharepoint with Office365 also meant that the client could utilize it as a centralized document repository to allow superior file sharing.

The website and booking applications were moved to a virtual environment with Amazon AWS to allow for easy scaling at peak times of demand. A schedule for vulnerability scanning was initiated using Qualys which is a cloud platform that helps you ensure compliance across your IT estate.

A cloud backup solution from Acronis was deployed to ensure all server data was backed up securely on a daily basis. This mean that the client was secure in the knowledge that if any data breach or failure should occur they can be back up and running in a matter of hours.

 

Result

The client was able to demonstrate compliance across all aspects of their IT infrastructure and also had added benefits of being able to increase productivity of the staff by putting in place an infrastructure that was less reliant on time and location.