Wildcard PR are a well established and successful PR agency based in London, Bristol and Truro.
Last year Roadmap worked with Wildcard PR to transform their IT to meet the changing needs of their business. Our brief, to build and support a platform that would allow their team to work securely from any location, without losing the functionality and security they currently had from working within the same office. The London team would be moving to a WeWork and needed the ability to work from any of the WeWork breakout areas. As staff and teams would be working remotely, Wildcard were aware that there would be an ever greater importance on securing their systems to avoid data loss or leakage.
As Roadmap would be managing Wildcard’s technology we also needed to build a system that would enable us to manage all their systems remotely.
Our solution focused on the clients needs, IT management and data security.
We set about rebuilding and in some instances upgrading all of their computers and mobile devices to ensure all the builds were configured consistently and would meet the needs of the new technology we would be introducing. We used Meraki Systems Manager (MDM) and custom scripting to help deploy systems and software and applied the agreed IT security profiles to all devices. From this point onwards Roadmap now had a secure remote platform for managing system and software patches, remote access, reporting and monitoring tools. In addition Roadmap Protect was installed on all endpoints to help Roadmap proactively monitor for malware, hardware or network issues.
The old on-premise Active Directory server was replaced with JumpCloud and Egnyte. JumpCloud, a cloud based directory enabled Roadmap to manage all the user accounts securely using 2FA across endpoints and cloud based platforms. Egnyte, a secure cloud based file sharing platform revolutionised how the team could now access and share files both within the office and remotely and was integrated with JumpCloud for SSO and centralised user management. Importantly the Egnyte user experience was very similar to how users had worked when accessing files within the finder, this familiarity was very helpful with user adoption.
Office 365 was already being used but Roadmap integrated this with Jumpcloud for SSO and centralised user management.
Code42 was used to help secure endpoints by backing up data remotely, protecting the business from accidental or purposeful deletion. The backup functionality also doubled up to protect users from Ransomware threats. Code42 also enabled the management teams to monitor and report on endpoint usage, an essential tool for a disparate work force.
On-premise accounting systems were moved to cloud based alternatives.
Telephony and VoIP were moved to a platform that enabled users to communicate over soft phones, or web based video conferencing.
The network equipment within the offices was replaced with Meraki equipment, helping complete the remote management and visibility Roadmap needed to ensure all sites could be managed remotely. This was also tied to JumpCloud for added security and SSO.
Once all the work was complete Roadmap IT organised a Cyber Essentials + audit which Wildcard passed with flying colours.
Roadmap managed the whole transition and implementation. The customer was extremely pleased and user adoption was quick and painless.
Fast forward to March 2020 and due to the Covid 19 Pandemic businesses were quickly realising the importance of having systems in place that enabled their teams to work remotely. In recent days and weeks, we have helped almost all of our customers adapt their technology to enable their teams to work remotely but for some this has been a reactive process and with the obvious time restrictions has only addressed their immediate needs which typically have been around file sharing. Wildcard have been in an enviable position where their teams could simply take computer equipment home and continue to operate their technology securely as normal.
