Case Study
Microsoft 365 at Volunteering Matters
Volunteering Matters (VM) bring people together to overcome some of society’s most complex issues through the power of volunteering. They partner with communities to overcome adversity – tackling social isolation and loneliness, improving health, developing skills and opportunity and making sure young people can lead change.
VM approached Smartdesc as they wanted to move away from ageing on-premise Remote Desktop services to a modern, agile technology platform that can grow and adapt with their needs.
Challenge
In the face of the global Covid-19 pandemic, VM’s outdated Remote Desktop setup was no longer fit for purpose.
As VM were also involved with the national Covid-19 response, moving to Microsoft 365 was an ideal fit. As a charity, they would also benefit from greatly reduced software costs, and better adaptability to the new distributed ways of working from home.
“Moving to Microsoft cloud services enabled us to adopt flexible working far more effectively during the pandemic. Having previously relied on static servers and fiddly VPN connections, it has been a breath of fresh air to fully embrace M365. Our IT partners, Smartdesc, have been instrumental in helping us with this move, indeed we couldn’t have done it without them. Their affinity with the Not-for-Profit sector has proven invaluable at such a challenging time for charities in general.“
Michael Joseph, Chief Finance Officer, Volunteering Matters
Solution
Charities are increasingly reliant on data and technology to deliver their missions. It is important that all staff are aware of their Information Security responsibilities and not just the IT teams.
The ISO 27001 standard provides a management process for ensuring information is managed securely across Mind and is audited by an external certification body, which provides assurance to boards, trustees and beneficiaries.
Results
The charity is now running a fully cloud-based infrastructure, that scales up and down – without the need to ever do mass upgrades again.
Software is always up-to-date, and VM benefit from new features and functionality as it is rolled out across the
Microsoft ecosystem.
M365 has greatly simplified operations, allowing seamless remote working from anywhere, just at the time when it was needed most, as we all had to pivot to new ways of working.
Other benefits to the charity include:
- Future-proof, scalable platform, with continuous updates and a consistent user experience.
- Highly resilient, removing single point of failure servers and outdated Remote Desktop experience.
- Centralised cloud management of Users and Devices, without the need for any VPN.
- Microsoft Teams acting as a central collaboration hub for voice, video and file sharing.
- Microsoft non-profit grant scheme provides licensing that reduces operating cost.
- A Microsoft Partner that specialises in the sector and works collaboratively as a trusted advisor.