The Irish Harp Centre is a micro SME located in Castleconnell in County Limerick with 2 staff. Janet Harbison is the Director of the music school and the owner of the Irish Harp Orchestra which travels all over Europe at various concerts and music events. Janet is a Grammy award winner, and also travels to London and across Europe to provide lectures and training workshops for the Celtic Harp.
The Irish Harp Centre contacted CloudAssist about migrating from the Server they were using and to moving over to a cloud based system. Office 365 was the preferred option for this SME and Cloud Assist discussed with Janet the action plan for the migration.
The migration went ahead and almost immediately Janet could see the benefits. Janettravels for work and, in the part, this caused a disconnect in terms of her accessibility to her email and data with her old IT setup. Now with Office 365, Janet can access her emails and data on the move which means that she is never too far away from the office. The Irish Harp Centre purchased a Microsoft Small Business Server with a Spam Filter PC and Uninterruptible Power Supply for €5,500 4 years ago.
The cost of 3rd Party Server Maintenance contract - €1,500 per annum 
Spam service and other server software subscriptions (SSL certs etc.) - €225 per annum
Electricity consumption for 2 Machines plus UPS & backup drives- €195 per annum (estimated)
Total annum IT running cost = €1,920 excluding the annual depreciation of the Server capex
Total annual IT Cost of Ownership = €3,020 (including Server Capex cost depreciated over 5 years)
In Feb 2015, CloudAssist migrated the Irish Harp Centre from their existing on-premises IT infrastructure to the cloud using 2 x Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium subscriptions at an annual cost of €230 per year (excl VAT) with a direct financially backed SLA (Service Level Agreement) to Microsoft Business support. This resulted in a direct reduction of 90+% in their IT Total Cost of Ownership per annum.
Here is the description of the Office 365 licenses and costs for 12 months.
The ROI (Return-On-Investment) from moving to Office 365 for the Irish Harp Centre (including the migration cost and licenses) was less than 9 months with the additional benefits listed below.
Here are the main points that the case study will cover when highlighting the additional benefits of Office 365 for the Irish Harp Centre
Mobility – Email and data on the go, across all devices even on other people’s PCs. This has been extremely valuable for Janet when she is working away from the office especially for concerts and international travel across Europe for teaching and lecturing. This was not possible with the old server setup which could only be accessed while at the office in Limerick.
E-learning – Using Skype for Business (formerly known as Lync) with the HD (High Definition) camera and the unlimited cloud storage, Janet will be able to conduct e-learning session and shared them with your clients anywhere in the world.
Cost saving– By decommissioning the server, Janet has benefitted from direct cost savings for the maintenance costs plus the capital expenditure saving to replace this server in the future.
There is also an added benefit that the Irish Harp Centre data is now back-up (14 times) in the cloud which, as revealed during the preparation for the migration, was not happening on her server for over 5 months. Data loss is difficult to quantify however only the owner knows the true cost of losing important information including intellectual property such as compositions and correspondence that Janet Harbison relies on so much for her work as an artist.
Collaboration – Janet can now collaborate with other users rather than sending individual attachments via email and increase the opportunity for collaboration with other organisations across Europe.
Promotion – With the new Video Channel in Office 365, Janet will be able to promote her business to targeted audiences rather than over-sharing her intellectual property (i.e. her music) to the general public as in the case with YouTube and other social networking sites.
Evergreen – Irish Harp Centre now have the latest Office applications with the ability to work offline when travelling or if the broadband service to this rural location is disrupted. In the last 12 months, 150 new features were added to Office 365 however the subscription price of Office 365 remains the same which is where the term ‘Evergreen’ relates to this cloud service.
Backup – Analysis of the server at the time of migration showed that the backup of data was being performed to an on premise external hard-drive which had been plugged out for the previous 3 months which could have caused serious data loss if the server failed during that time. Also if the server and external hard-drive was destroyed or stolen then the client would have no backup of their data which would have been catastrophic as this contained unique recordings and compositions that would be irreplaceable Intellectual Property.
Multiple Aliases – There is only 2 staff however the organisation has multiple domains and email addresses which are now located under 2 email accounts as aliases which the need for additional licenses. This is powerful feature in Office 365 as this allows a SME to present different personas to different markets without the need to increase the cost of Office 365 licenses.
CloudAssist is a certified Microsoft Cloud Partner with a number of other technology partners such as DocuSign, Plantronics & SP Marketplace to deliver value-add cloud services for the Irish SME sector while maximizing your investment in Office 365.
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