Helping Biokil Crown maintain their phenomenal growth

The company has grown rapidly to become one of the U.K’s largest manufacturers and suppliers to the building and construction industry of damp-proofing chemicals, timber preservatives and waterproofing products. They also supply adhesives, sealants and general building chemicals.

Their comprehensive support for products and training is provided nationwide by their team of highly trained Sales & Technical Consultants and is further supplemented by their in-house training facilities and on-site Technical Specification Service.

Key Solution Highlights & Benefits

• Biokil Crown had 3 rented physical servers that were aging and reaching the end of both their support and lease dates – CIS virtualised these 3 physical servers and installed them on a VMWare ESXi platform hosted on a new, single physical server for increased resilience, performance and business efficiency.
• There was no off-site back up process in place – CIS implemented an on, and off site disaster recovery solution that automatic with no user intervention required.
• Having to run and manage onsite IT operations was becoming more and more time-consuming – CIS supplied full onsite and remote support to allow Biokil Crown to focus on their core business.

The Challenge

Managing a fast-growing, successful business is difficult enough without having to worry about aging IT infrastructure. The irregular, manual and time-consuming back-ups were also a constant challenge, along with keeping the IT lights on to ensure the business continued to operate effectively.

Being able to pass all the pain of managing IT operations for a dynamic and fast-moving business to an experienced, skilled and trusted partner would allow Andrew and his team to focus on their core business of manufacturing and supplying a comprehensive range of waterproofing products, damp-proofing chemicals and preservatives to the booming building and construction market.

The Solution

Aging hardware presented a risk to the smooth running of Biokil Crown’s business. CIS migrated Biokil Crown’s systems from 3 aging physical servers to a virtual ESXi platform that was hosted on a single, new, more powerful physical server ensuring that the chances of hardware failure were reduced and that the performance of the virtualised, business- critical applications was optimised. CIS planned and project-managed the entire migration of the data, OS and applications smoothly and efficiently.

It was vital that backups were performed on time, every time and effectively so CIS implemented an automated Veeam backup system which makes a local backup stored onsite and a copy that resides on CIS’s private cloud in a military-grade bunker. This gives Biokil Crown the peace of mind that is provided by knowing their data is safe.

Andrew and his team found they were spending more and more time on ensuring that the IT required to support their business was up and running – after a brief consultation, it was agreed that CIS would manage the IT operations on behalf of Biokil Crown. This would include monitoring and optimising server performance, dealing with Internet connectivity issues and ensuring that all patches and upgrades were installed painlessly and with minimum disruption.

Biokil Crown is a fast-paced, rapidly-growing company, so working with CIS to modernise, optimise, automate and manage their IT infrastructure was the perfect way of allowing Biokil Crown to do what they do best – supply and support the rocketing construction industry.