Case Studies

Modern Workplace Transformation for a Children’s Charity

Charity / Not-for-profit

Services involved

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The Client

Our client is a registered charity working across Swale and mid-Kent, delivering early education and childcare through multiple nurseries; intensive family support including parenting programmes, a food bank and community pantry; and community engagement through volunteer programmes, work placements and a community garden.

The charity’s work is carried out by a mixed workforce of permanent staff, sessional and bank workers and a substantial volunteer base, operating across multiple registered sites and community venues, all working to a single vision: giving children and families the best opportunities in life.

Our Role

Cloudscape was appointed to retire the charity’s ageing on-premises server estate and deliver a fully cloud-based Microsoft 365 modern workplace, and just as importantly to make sure its not-for-profit Microsoft licensing was working as hard as it possibly could.

We act as the charity’s outsourced IT department and Virtual IT Director (vCIO), combining day-to-day service desk support and project delivery with strategic planning that reflects how a charity actually operates: funding cycles, trustee governance, Ofsted-registered provision and an absolute duty of care to the children and families it serves.

Challenges

  • Ageing on-premises servers approaching end of life, with an unbudgeted hardware refresh and no funding line to cover it
  • Staff, sessional workers and volunteers spread across nurseries, the family hub and community venues, tethered to VPN and fixed desktops
  • Safeguarding records and special category data about children and families held in unstructured folders with inconsistent permissions
  • Rising phishing and fraud risk targeting the charity sector, with no formal security certification to evidence to funders
  • New starters and seasonal nursery staff waiting days for a working, secured device
  • Technology decisions made reactively, with no roadmap and no clear line of sight for trustees

Solutions

  • Full decommission of the on-premises server estate, with file data migrated to SharePoint Online and OneDrive and identity moved to Microsoft Entra ID, with no replacement hardware required
  • Microsoft Teams and SharePoint restructured around the charity’s service areas, with OneDrive Known Folder Move deployed and secure access from any managed device on any site
  • Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels, DLP and retention policies applied to safeguarding, HR and DBS records, with SharePoint permissions rebuilt on a least-privilege model
  • Defender for Business, Defender for Office 365, Conditional Access and MFA deployed across the estate, supported by a staff awareness programme
  • Windows Autopilot and Microsoft Intune, so devices ship pre-configured, enrol automatically and are ready to use on day one
  • Quarterly vCIO reviews with the senior leadership team and trustees, underpinned by a three-year roadmap, risk register and technology alignment scoring

Business Impact

  • Eliminated all on-premise servers, reducing the estate from 3 servers to 0.
  • Reduced monthly service desk tickets from 30 to 20, a 33% reduction.
  • Improved average resolution times from 5.8 hours to 1.9 hours, making issue resolution 67% faster.
  • Accelerated new starter onboarding from 2 days to under 1 hour.
  • Increased device encryption and Intune compliance from 0% to 100% across the organisation.
Client testimonial

Don’t just take our word for it

“Retiring the servers took away a worry we’d been carrying for years. Our team can now work securely from the hub, the nurseries or out in the community and we know the information families trust us with is properly protected. Just as importantly, Cloudscape helped us get far more out of the Microsoft licensing we were already paying for, which for a charity means more of every pound going where it should, to children and families.”

Ian

Head of Development

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