Bedell Group

The Bedell Group is a Jersey based business comprised of Bedell Cristin, a leading financial law firm and Bedell Trust, one of Jersey’s leading independent trust companies. The group had pursued impressive plans for growth in recent years and currently stood at 200 employees strong.They planned to continue to increase, with a projected growth of 20% per year expanding into London, Dublin, Geneva and Guernsey . The firm needed to enhance their IT infrastructure to meet their plans for growth. Along with the expansion strategy, they also intended to increase employee productivity by deploying flexible working practises. Theywanted to give staff seamless access to the company network at any location.

Based on our excellent reputation and value for money service, Bedell Group decided to call on Frontier to provide solutions to meet their new IT infrastructure demands.

Our Solutions: Citrix XenApp for secure, flexible access

After conducting a thorough IT assessment, and fully analysing Bedell Group’s current and future needs, our consultants decided to install Citrix XenApp which were centrally deployed with Microsoft Windows Server on HP ProLiant servers. This solution would provide Bedell Group employees with access to applications and information from any device in any location in real time. To provide an adequate disaster recovery plan, we split their servers between Bedell Group’s Jersey headquarters and a secure offsite co-location facility, providing near-instant recovery in the case of a disaster.

Leo Cavendish, Head of Group IT explains “Real-time access to client data is pivotal to our ability to react quickly to market opportunities and demands. An intangible benefit that can’t be overstated is the flexibility that Citrix XenApp provided us. It really did give us the ability to work from anywhere, on any devise in double-quick time”

The ability of Citrix XenApp to provide virtualised application delivery on any device enabled the Bedell Group to maximise its existing IT investments, while avoiding an expensive hardware refresh. “The effort involved in managing remote access has been vastly reduced,” concluded Cavendish. “Remote access administration is managed by in-house staff, with 24/7 support from Frontier Technology to give complete peace of mind. The system is pivotal to our ability to react quickly to market opportunities and client demands. Citrix has also helped to defer the cost of rolling out replacement PCs, toa value of approximately £50,000. We have already seen return on our investment.”

To further bolster security, Frontier also supplied the Frontier Authenticator solution, which provided a strong, multi-layer authentication for all web-based applications. It delivers a layer of security beyond what is possible using conventional, single layer password entry. Users are prompted for random sequences of characters from their online Authenticator password and are given only a finite amount of time to complete the request. Similar systems are employed by major online banking sites.

“Frontier demonstrated a true understanding of the requirements of our business, instilling absolute confidence in both business and technical staff” commented Leo Cavendish. “The whole solution was delivered on time and within budget. In addition to supplying us with a secure and robust solution, our IT staff have also received site and system specific training from Frontier’s own trainers to ensure we are fully equipped to ably manage the new system”.