Business Support
Fingertip Solutions are a specialist Business to Business IT Support Provider. Our core support service can be thought of as an “outsourced IT department”. You pay us a fixed monthly fee and we take care of any aspect of IT within your business – computing, telecoms, mobile devices, printing, hosting, backup, business continuity… if you consider it to be in-scope for support then so do we!
Our prices start from just £27.50 per computer per month (less than £1 per day) and this entitles you to unlimited support. That’s unlimited telephone support, unlimited remote support, unlimited on-site support, unlimited project management, unlimited staff training, unlimited advice and consultancy. Our service to our customers really is… unlimited! We ensure that we have a minimum spare capacity of 35% allocated engineer time. This ensures that we have at least two engineers available to attend to your problems every day. We recruit to supply demand and can guarantee our service levels to you. We operate a fully ITIL- compliant helpdesk, and we always seek to be at the end of the phone whenever you need us, with no clock-watching and no hidden charges. With a Fingertip Solutions support contract you are truly fixing the cost of IT support within your organisation.
We have many years’ experience supporting businesses in manufacturing, logistics, insurance, accounting and field service to name but a few. We are fully versed in technologies from Microsoft, Apple, VMWare, Oracle, Sage, SAP, Salesforce and many more. If a package you are using doesn’t presently form part of our skills matrix then we’ll bring our 70+ years of combined experience to bear, and undertake any training necessary (at our own expense) to deliver the expertise you expect and deserve.
Education Support
At Fingertip Solutions we operate a specialist Education support unit. For a fixed annual price of £8650.00 you are entitled to the following services:
- Technical & Curriculum Support
- Minimum Half Day per Week Onsite Support
- Unlimited IT Project Management & Delivery
- Unlimited IT INSET for School Staff
- Technical & Curriculum Support
- Online Safeguarding Guidance
- Unlimited Reactive & Remote Support
- Rapid Response Times
- SIMS / MIS Support
- OFSTED Support
In other words you get the same technician visiting your school on a weekly basis. We aim to be part of your school family – visible at all times, approachable, friendly and able to not just fix problems but explain clearly what we are doing and suggest better ways of working. We will work with whatever technologies and processes you prefer in your school – we understand that education isn’t a “one size fits all” environment and will work to support technology in your context. We don’t mandate a particular brand of hardware, software, supplier or even a mechanism for reporting to us. We’ll work with what you are most comfortable with, and will help you to devise a computing strategy that is designed with your school’s needs at the forefront. Also, we’ll deal with any 3rd party suppliers on your behalf – telecoms companies, local authorities, Capita, CPOMS, whoever it might be. We aim to be your one stop shop for anything IT related and will never tell you it’s somebody else’s problem and push it back on you or your staff to resolve.
We work term time and holidays, and will begin setting up any IT equipment the moment it arrives. It’s important to get any new technology into the hands of teachers and students as soon as practically possible so that you can begin to realise the benefits.
We deliver staff training, too. Either as part of an INSET session, or working individually with teachers – deskside – to help support and integrate a chosen technology into your environment.
When your school is subject to an OFSTED inspection we will ensure that one of our engineers is available to your teachers, discretely, so that you can concentrate on the inspection and the lessons being delivered without fear of technology being a barrier to proving just how good your school is.
We meet regularly with SLT representatives from our member schools, and if there is something that we’re not doing that you would like us to do then consider it done! We want to build long term relationships with our schools, and to underpin this we must change with the times. In the past we’ve used this facility to deliver a computing scheme of work, GDPR consultancy and remote “live teaching” support to our schools to name a few examples.
Cyber Security
Protecting your business from cyber attack is an unfortunate necessity for most companies operating today. A wide range of malicious actors operate secretly to gather information about your business, looking for vulnerabilities to exploit so that they can steal or extort money from you.
The good news is that by employing a few simple information security measures (changes to systems, and working practices) you can make your company a hard target. As is often the case with criminals, a hard target is passed over in favour of finding an easier victim to exploit.
We can support you by auditing your systems and explaining in simple terms how to strengthen the borders of your information ecosystem. From here, we can assist you with obtaining Cyber Essentials accreditation (a UK Government backed scheme costing only £300 that certifies your organisation as being resistant to cyber attack, including basic cyber liability insurance). Beyond that we can provide guidance enabling a pathway to Cyber Essentials Plus or suggest suitable cyber insurance policies from our trusted partner Ravenhall Risk Solutions.
Cloud Migration Support
It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of software vendors are moving their platforms online. Software as a Service (SaaS) is the delivery model of the future as our increasingly interconnected world centralises systems to permit access from anywhere.
Despite this, not all industry sectors stand to benefit from this model in the short to medium term, and fewer still have made meaningful steps towards migrating platforms to the cloud. We have considerable experience and a proven track record in helping companies to develop cloud strategies that work for them – taking advantage of systems that will benefit them by being hosted in the cloud, whilst simultaneously taking a realistic position on systems that cannot be migrated to our failover to the cloud (computer aided manufacture, for example).
We have helped our customers develop hybrid cloud strategies, making them more productive, efficient and resilient through adopting the cloud whilst keeping focus on core in-house competencies at the same time.
High Availability & Disaster Recovery
High Availability is the art of designing a system that is hard to break. Disaster Recovery is designing a system that can recover from an unavoidable disaster.
Every company can benefit from both High Availability and Disaster Recovery, but the benefits must be proportional to the cost, and also align with a company’s risk appetite.
Generally speaking, High Availability is a game of diminishing returns. It gets exponentially more expensive to build platforms with an extra percentage point of predicted uptime and we can usually help you to find a balance that meets your company’s needs. If an hour of downtime per year is easily absorbed into your production schedule then it doesn’t make sense to invest huge sums of money into a platform with a predicted downtime of only 10 minutes. However, if downtime of 24 hours would be catastrophic to you then the good news is that it’s pragmatic and affordable to architect a system that will prevent such an
outcome.
Disaster recovery tends to present a fixed cost based on the size, complexity and nature of a given business. It tends to encompass a variety of systems and working practices, not just IT equipment. At its simplest it’s an offsite backup of your data and systems, with a mechanism for restoring them. At its most complex and far-reaching it can be an entire shadow operation waiting to be activated in the event of disaster.
Remote Working
The modern workplace has long extended beyond the walls of your physical premises. The ability to stay in contact at all times is essential to many businesses, and this has never been in sharper focus than during the Global Covid-19 Pandemic.
Managing the ability to work remotely is a fine balance between facilitating remote access, and ensuring that your data (most companies’ greatest asset) remains secure at all times. At Fingertip Solutions we can trace the state of the art in this regard from our early Citrix Metaframe servers back in 1997 (accessed by a dial-up modem!) to always-on access to your data from the phone in the palm of your hand.
We can bring our considerable experience to bear in helping your company address remote working in the right way: enabling your staff to be productive and happy whilst ensuring data integrity and your compliance with data protection legislation such as the GDPR.
Voice & Connectivity
Connectivity is at the heart of how we all work. The ability to telephone a customer reliably with guaranteed service uptime, crystal clear call quality and at a reasonable cost is absolutely essential. Likewise access to the internet for email, web traffic and accessing cloud platforms… Very few businesses can manage without for any period of time.
At Fingertip Solutions, we partner with the very best providers – such as Abzorb – to ensure that your business stays connected to your customers and suppliers at all times. From mobile phones to cloud-hosted VOIP handsets, fibre broadband to multi-gigabit leased lines we can guide you towards the best product to meet your needs and a competitive price.
Take a look at the following case studies to gain insight into the ways we’ve worked to connect our customers, improving their productivity and confidence in their communications platforms.
Website Design
Web identity, and the ability to position your website near the top of the search rankings is essential. At Fingertip Solutions we can provide you with a website that’s not only striking and eye-catching, but based around the latest WordPress Content Management System (CMS) empowering you to control the content within your site.
It’s also important to ensure that a modern website is as accessible as possible – presenting your content clearly on a range of devices (tablets and phones, as well as more traditional computers) and for users with a range of assistive requirements.
Fingertip Solutions can assist you with all of these and more, delivering a website you can be proud of at a price you can afford. Our bespoke website packages start at just £1750.00 ex VAT, and we can provide references upon request.