A multi-office accounting and financial advisory firm serving business and individual clients across the New York Metro Area — 35 staff including CPAs, financial advisors, bookkeepers, and administrative teams operating under strict data confidentiality obligations and peak seasonal demand.
Offices managed
Staff migrated to cloud
Success rate of bot case completion
IT incidents during tax season
The Challenge
For a regional accounting firm, technology failure during tax season isn’t an inconvenience — it’s a crisis. Two years before engaging Solved IT, that crisis happened. A failing on-premise server caused six hours of unplanned downtime during the firm’s busiest two-week stretch of the year. Files were recovered. Deadlines were met — barely. But the underlying infrastructure that caused it hadn’t changed.
The firm was running two aging Windows Server environments across their two offices — one primary, one that served as a loose backup — both past end-of-support and due for a hardware refresh the IT vendor had quoted at $220,000. Staff who needed to work remotely during tax season were accessing files through a VPN that was slow, unreliable, and not configured to modern security standards. There was no formal disaster recovery plan. When their internal IT coordinator left the company, the firm was left managing their own environment with no technical resource and an aging infrastructure they didn’t fully understand.
The managing partner’s requirements going into the engagement were direct: fix the reliability problem, eliminate the $220,000 capital expense, make remote work actually work, and don’t let anything disrupt the upcoming tax season.
What Solved IT Did
Solved IT began with a full technology assessment and a vCIO engagement — reviewing the existing infrastructure, identifying the gaps, and building a three-year technology roadmap that aligned the firm’s IT investment with their operational calendar, their growth trajectory, and their client confidentiality obligations. The roadmap made one thing clear immediately: the $220,000 server refresh was the wrong investment. The right move was cloud.
IT Strategy & Advisory — vCIO Engagement Before touching a single piece of technology, Solved IT’s vCIO worked with the managing partner and operations lead to build a technology plan that mapped every decision to a business outcome. The server refresh was replaced with a cloud migration strategy. The IT coordinator vacancy was addressed through managed IT rather than a replacement hire. The remote work problem was solved as part of the migration, not as a separate project. Having a technology roadmap meant every dollar spent had a reason behind it — and the firm stopped making reactive technology decisions.
Cloud Migration — Microsoft 365 & Azure Over a single extended weekend, Solved IT migrated all 35 staff from the legacy on-premise environment to Microsoft 365 — email, document management, and collaboration tools moved to SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. Client files, engagement workpapers, and historical records were migrated to SharePoint with folder-level permissions matching the firm’s existing access structure. Azure Active Directory replaced the on-premise domain, with MFA enforced on every account from day one. Staff arrived Monday morning to a cloud environment that worked — and remote access that no longer required the VPN.
Cybersecurity & Data Security Client financial data carries significant confidentiality and liability exposure. We deployed endpoint protection across all 35 workstations, implemented email security and anti-phishing controls, and configured Microsoft 365’s compliance features — retention policies, audit logging, and data loss prevention — appropriate for a firm handling sensitive personal and business financial records. Dark web monitoring was added to flag any exposure of firm or staff credentials on criminal marketplaces.
Network Upgrade The existing network infrastructure at both offices was undersized for a fully cloud-dependent environment. We upgraded switching and wireless access point infrastructure at both locations, reconfigured network segmentation, and optimized the internet circuit configurations to support Teams calls, SharePoint document collaboration, and cloud backup without the latency the team had experienced on the VPN.
Managed IT Solved IT assumed full managed IT responsibility following the migration — replacing the departed IT coordinator with a full team available under one flat monthly rate. Patch management, endpoint monitoring, helpdesk support, and quarterly IT reviews are included. The managing partner no longer fields calls from staff about IT problems. They get a monthly report instead.
The Results
- $220,000 in capital expenditure eliminated — server hardware refresh replaced entirely by cloud infrastructure; technology cost converted from unpredictable capital expense to flat monthly managed services fee
- First disruption-free tax season in three years — zero IT incidents during peak season; 99.9% uptime maintained across the full engagement period vs. an estimated 94% on the legacy environment
- Three-year technology roadmap in place — vCIO engagement produced a documented plan tying every future IT investment to a business goal; no more reactive purchasing decisions
- IT coordinator vacancy eliminated — managed IT engagement replaced the need for a full-time internal hire, with broader technical coverage at lower annual cost than a single mid-level IT coordinator salary
- Full remote work capability live from day one post-migration — all 35 staff able to access files, email, and collaboration tools from any device without VPN; remote and hybrid scheduling now operationally viable year-round
- Migration completed in a single weekend — all 35 users migrated with zero client-facing disruption and no lost working hours
