Established in 1995, Affinity Group is a collective of four companies that focus on accounting services for individuals, small businesses, and the flexible workforce.
The group had cultivated a strong reputation and vibrant culture, delivering exceptional service and upholding core values that foster growth and success.
When Affinity’s previous IT provider was acquired , service quality began to decline. Support slowed, updates were missed, and familiar contacts disappeared. Affinity’s team found themselves repeating information, leading to significant inefficiencies and time losses across all four businesses.
A key challenge was supporting Affinity’s business-critical legacy software, which remained dependent on on-premise hosting. Their Citrix-based IT environment, still running Office 2016 and Microsoft Exchange, required constant internal intervention simply to maintain critical operations. Meanwhile, cybersecurity compliance pressures were increasing, with partners beginning to mandate Cyber Essentials certification.
With limited on-site support and no assistance towards compliance, Affinity needed a new approach, combining modernisation, operational continuity, and a proactive partner ready to lead the transformation.
Sentinel began with a comprehensive discovery phase, building a complete understanding of Affinity’s existing technology stack, legacy system requirements, and expectations for a no-compromise deployment.
Recognising that essential legacy systems needed to remain on Affinity’s private servers, Sentinel developed a tailored, multi-cloud solution. This combined Affinity’s private cloud environment with Sentinel’s enterprise grade cloud services, securely hosted within its Hampshire-based data centre.
Sentinel’s cloud services offered all the advantages of a modern setup, including hybrid working, automated backups, and enhanced cyber protection, without limiting access to the tools. Affinity relied upon. The new solution enabled Affinity’s teams to access their full work environment, including legacy applications, securely from any device, anywhere.
To support this transition, new hardware including laptops, desktops, routers, and network switches, was deployed, fully configured for optimal cloud access. Remote monitoring and maintenance were also incorporated to ensure devices remained updated, secure, and fully operational.
To complement the new cloud environment, Sentinel deployed a managed print solution with secure follow-me printing, implemented in collaboration with its sister company Collate. This integrated seamlessly with the cloud desktop environment, enabling staff to print securely from any location to any printer within the network, collecting documents only when physically present, enhancing both security and cost control.
Each business was upgraded sequentially, with lessons from each rollout applied to streamline the next. Despite the complexities involved in modernising four distinct businesses, the full project, including achieving Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation, was completed within just eight weeks.
For added reassurance, Affinity valued the closeness of Sentinel’s on-site engineers, located just 10 – 20 minutes away, ready to respond swiftly should any physical hardware issues arise.
Affinity Group now benefits from a robust IT infrastructure, delivering significantly improved performance and reliability. Workstations load 70% faster, critical issues are resolved within an hour, and the modernised cloud environment supports uninterrupted productivity and accelerated onboarding.
The Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation has already proven valuable, enabling Affinity to expand their business with greater confidence. Thanks to the streamlined onboarding process, new staff can now be integrated more rapidly; a crucial advantage, given that the team has grown by 30% since partnering with Sentinel.
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