Lifestyle Appliances

Investment in a good IT partner is crucial for distributor’s success

Having been an OGL customer for over seven years, Lifestyle Appliances understand just how important investing in a good IT partner is to progress their business and become the largest independent supplier of leisure products within the UK. We met up with Lifestyle Appliances’ Company Secretary, to discuss their unique partnership with OGL: “Back in 2012 we started our OGL journey by investing in their Business Software, prof.ITplus. Without their software we definitely wouldn’t be able to continue to operate. All of our purchasing, invoicing, accounting and stock control is all run from prof.ITplus, so it really is our life support.

“Having been a customer for a number of years, we felt confident in them looking after our IT solutions, and they’ve since gone on to provide us with IT Support, Office 365, Cloud Recovery and Proactive Administration.”

They continued: “We are always looking to keep up-to-date with IT developments and how they can improve the efficiency of the administration processes within our business, and thereby enabling the business to grow without increasing the hidden costs of administering such growth. OGL has drastically helped with this.

“Their Cloud Recovery solution has also given us peace of mind and improved our data security. The automated off-site backups have removed the element of human error and kept our data secure. They also supply us with Office 365, which not only helps us create a modern working environment by being able to work remotely, but this also helps with our IT security, as hosting our emails in the cloud allows it to be safely backed up.

“With cyber-crime increasing, we turned our attention to proactively invest in our cyber security, which ultimately led us into talks with OGL’s Cyber Security division, CyberGuard. We were interested in mitigating the probability of a cyber-attack and we really wanted to adhere to the requirements implemented in the updated data protection laws, especially GDPR, which was launched last year.

“As OGL is our IT partner it was an easy decision to work alongside them for our cyber security. They recommended their next-generation anti-virus product, Carbon Black Defense which offers real-time monitoring and advanced security measures to help protect our network. Since being installed it has certainly reduced the amount of virus-attacks we have encountered, and these attacks have been neutralised at the source before they have had the opportunity to infiltrate our systems which we are extremely happy about.”

Lifestyle Appliances’, Company Secretary concluded: “Ongoing investment in IT is critical to maintain updated and protected operating systems and platforms so that all our, and our customers’, information is held within a secure environment to avoid cyber-attacks and fraudulent use of the information held. We feel confident in partnering with OGL and excited what the future holds.”