Case Study:
SBLR

In August 2016, a small group of accountants from SBLR LLP – a Toronto-based CPA that had in 2013 become part of one of the largest independent accounting and consulting firms in Canada – decided to part ways with the larger group and re-establish the original company.

As part of the agreement, they took with them long-standing clients worth CAN$3.5m of annual fees, 18 employees, most of whom were fee-earners, and some laptops and computers borrowed from their previous employer.

They were ambitious and starting fresh. But the high pressure of tax season would start in five short months, and with no IT infrastructure and limited IT skills and resource, they had to extract all their clients’ data from the group’s systems and secure it in their own environment – and all the while, maintain excellent service and repay their clients’ trust in them during the move.

This new environment was to be built entirely from scratch. Though despite the time pressure and the size of the challenge, SBLR saw it as a rare opportunity. They could create a modern, “cloud first” infrastructure, unencumbered by legacy systems or hardware and that had agility, flexibility and cost-efficiency built into it from the very start.

The first step was to set up the cloud environment. Calligo designed and created a multi-VM Virtual Datacentre in its Tier 3 Toronto facility, with private resource allocation running on the latest Microsoft virtualization technology.

The Toronto location of the Calligo datacentre was important due to the data residency requirements incumbent upon CPAs. The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) requires Canadian citizens to be able to provide a copy of their tax records for audit purposes, and if those records are kept on cloud infrastructure, then at least a copy must be physically stored in Canada so that the CRA does not have to contend with other jurisdictions’ privacy laws to audit its own citizens. There was also an additional policy requirement of SBLR’s own, in that they did not wish to expose their clients’ data to other countries’ data access laws by storing it or any copies of it outside Canada.

Find out more about Managed Cloud Service 

As part of its ongoing IT Managed Services, Calligo provides network monitoring, proactive support and patching and a helpdesk that tackles user issues ranging from technical queries to “how to” requests. The Calligo team also provides on call on-site support when needed, plus additional maintenance services, including new user set up and device optimization.