A multi-office rural consultancy connects its offices best by running cloud-based systems, standardising every site’s setup, securing the connections between them, and managing it all centrally. Done this way, every office works the same, your team reaches the same up-to-date data wherever they are, and adding a new office becomes a simple, repeatable process.
Rural firms often grow by opening offices in new areas, and the IT can end up as a patchwork that’s hard to support and inconsistent to work in. Here’s how to join it up.
1. Put the foundations in the cloud
With email, files and collaboration in Microsoft 365, and your specialist software made available across the firm, your offices share one source of information rather than separate islands. People moving between sites, or covering for each other, find everything where they expect it.
2. Standardise every office
The same laptop build, the same software setup and the same security baseline at every office means support is faster, problems are rarer, and a new office can be set up quickly from a known template instead of being figured out each time.
3. Secure the connections and access
Staff across sites need secure access to systems and data, with multi-factor authentication and access granted by role. Centralised identity means a single change protects every office at once, and onboarding or removing staff is quick and consistent across the firm.
4. Manage it all from one place
Central monitoring and management means we can see every office and site, spot issues early and keep them consistent. One partner who understands the whole firm is far easier than each office sorting its own IT.
A real example: a rural site back online before the team arrived
At one rural site we support, our managed RUCKUS Wi-Fi flagged six of seven access points dropping offline at 1:36am, caused by a broadband line fault. Our team worked the internet provider, configured a replacement router and sent an engineer to the site, and had the office back online the same morning. Central monitoring is what made that possible.
For most firms of your size, this sits within fully managed IT at about £45 to £100 per user per month, billed per user, with support, security and backups included.
Why rural consultancies choose First Stop IT
First Stop IT has supported businesses since 2002, including rural land, agronomy and property consultancies, and we know the software these firms rely on: Gatekeeper, BigHand, Argus Developer, Power BI, Google Earth Pro and Xero, alongside Microsoft 365. Our credentials include:
- Cyber Essentials Certified
- IASME Cyber Assurance (Gold)
- NCSC Assured Service Provider (Cyber Advisor for Cyber Essentials)
- Microsoft Partner
- Crown Commercial Service Supplier (G-Cloud)
- Quality Principles Certified
We look after more than 2,000 endpoints across 50 companies, we’ve been named a Top 50 UK MSP for three years running, and we support organisations with 10 to 100 employees across Essex, Hertfordshire and London, including Harlow and Bishop’s Stortford.
Book a free IT and cyber security review
Running several rural offices? Book a free IT and cyber security review with First Stop IT and we’ll help you join them up.