Amongst the first companies to give us their trust, we have Précis Translation Services. Precis provides sworn translations and interpreting services for businesses and individuals for the Luxembourgish market and abroad. The company specializes in French, German, English, Russian, and thanks to their extensive network of trusted providers, any language can be taken care of.
Problem Definition
We initially met Maria & Marina from Précis at Paperjam Business events, discussing their various pain points with the existing solution they had in place, and the very high cost associated to it. Furthermore, Précis was very unhappy with the level of service they were receiving from their current provider.
At the time, Précis was using a Private cloud service to host their Business Application. The provider used hosted Exchange servers to provide Emails.
We identified multiple issues with the existing setup:
- Lack of OS updates & communication
- Lack of knowledge from the provider regarding the Business Application
- Since Précis is a small business, customer support never knew who they were and how to handle incidents
- All incidents triggered additional costs
- Some outdated systems were used to enable secure connectivity to the environment
- And the most important: Précis was not the owner of the setup, meaning it could not be moved to another provider
Translating Business problems into IT solutions
Discussing with Maria and Marina, we agreed to set the following goals for the project:
- Security first: the translation environment must be secured, encrypted and highly available.
- The environment must be on the name of the customer. They must be able to continue using the system and switch to another provider if ever needed
- Emails must be as secured as possible and moved to the new provider transparently
- CAPEX must be reduced as much as possible. OPEX model preferred
Starting from the requirements, we first moved to a Proof of Concept model. In the timespan of a week F3C Systems was able to replicate and enhance the system used by Précis and show that it worked according to the specifications drafted. The only part that remained was to terminate the contract with the existing supplier.
Technical choices
As F3C Systems is a Microsoft CSP Indirect partner, the choice was made to move to the Microsoft AZURE Cloud and the emails to Microsoft Office 365. As security is key, we decided to choose the Microsoft 365 Business licences in order to have the best possible email security solution in place.
On the Azure side, a total of three Virtual Machines were deployed :
- A Fortinet Firewall with Advanced Threat prevention licence, to filter traffic flowing in and out of the environment. Additionally, a one-year Forticloud licence was added for reporting and data analysis
- A Server hosting both the fileshares and the MemoQ Application used for translations
- A client machine with all the regular Office tools and MemoQ client
The entire environment can only be accessed via VPN, in order to work on the translation projects in a secured and controlled environment, from anywhere at any time. It is secured 24×7 by the state-of-the-art antivirus solutions and linked to the F3C Systems alerting systems.
The migration phase
Précis informed us of the cutover date on Sep. 16 for a cutover date on Sep 23. Procurement of the licences, creation of the Microsoft Tenants, migration of the emails and of all necessary data was conducted between Sep. 16 and Sep. 20. Email cutover was finalised on Sep 21 and we delivered the entire system on Sep 23, the day the existing contract was ending with Précis’ previous provider.
Training and onsite assistance was provided to Précis on the day of the migration.
Some problems remained open after the migration, mostly in relation to printing, but were resolved in a timely manner and to the full satisfaction of the customer.
Money matters ! Cost savings
In terms of CAPEX, we had to procure some firewall licences and provide the migration services. Additionally, we decided to add one year of backup service for the Office 365 data of Précis. Cost : 4500€ for year 1, subsequent years will be billed 955€.
To lower costs, we use Reserved Instances in Azure, which were billed for a full year. Cost : 1216€
In terms of OPEX, we chose to use monthly billing for the Office 365 licences and Azure hosting costs. Cost : 350€ per month.
In total, we calculated with Precis that despite the initial costs, the move to the new infrastructure was generating savings of 75% after only 4 months of operations !
The opinion of our customer
Thanks to working with F3C Systems not only we managed to cut the IT costs, but also gained more confidence in our IT-infrastructure due to its overall higher stability. We know that if there is an issue, we will get immediate help. This is very important for a translation agency like ours as some clients are sending us requests around the clock. We appreciate the responsiveness, attention and reactivity of F3C. The transition (that we feared very much) from our previous provider was very smooth, our new system was available with a minimal cutoff period that we did not even notice.
Marina Pachabyt – Précis Translations Services
Customer contacts
Feel free to contact Précis at [email protected]
Website : https://www.precistranslations.lu
Phone : +352 26 20 18 84
