What to expect from a migration of on-premise software to a hosted server

Your practice doesn’t stand still. In a changing – and challenging – operating climate, you may be looking to provide greater customer value at less cost, drive automation deeper into your workflows, form specialist divisions and teams, adapt your working practices or maximise investment in technology.

Wolters Kluwer Professional Services can ensure the CCH Central suite of software your team uses on a daily basis enables change within your practice and stays aligned to your business strategy, now and in the future.

Supporting your migration

Moving your CCH Central suite of software out of your office and hosting it in a highly secure, remote data centre brings wide-ranging benefits in reducing overheads while improving accessibility and business continuity:

• You eliminate the considerable expense and effort of refreshing your IT infrastructure. At the same time, software performance is no longer degraded by ageing hardware.
• No surprises – outgoings become predictable, making it easier to set a budget.
• There’s no need to allocate resources to managing and maintaining your software. Installations, quarterly updates, patches and bug fixes are all done for you, at an agreed time, ensuring your teams have uninterrupted use of the latest versions.
• Using a hosted server protects your software and the invaluable client and business data stored on it, safeguarding your practice from devastating threats such as flood, fire, theft, cyberattack… Your data is constantly and automatically backed up to offsite servers, ready to be restored in the event of a data disaster.
• Users can log in to securely access the software from any location, strengthening business resilience. Meanwhile, remote access enables more flexible ways of working, helping you to retain talent by offering a better work-life balance.

From a niche high-street accountant, through to mid-tier practices, to the largest global firm, any practice can benefit from moving to a hosted environment. To learn more about our own hosting service, Our Hosting Solution (powered by HDUK), view an on-demand webinar: 24/7 remote mobile access to your entire practice with Our Hosting Solution (power by HDUK).

Guiding principles for Wolters Kluwer Professional Services migration assignments

Wolters Kluwer Professional Services can help you to realise the full benefits of moving to a hosted server. No two practices are the same. The scale of the migration is one factor. Some practices may have a server dedicated to their database and another server that users log onto to access the software. The number of servers required and whether load balancing will be used to log users onto the appropriate server automatically is another factor.

Large practices may also have multiple environments: a live/production environment and another for activities such as testing and training. Other considerations will include which products of the CCH Central suite are in use, and whether the practice has any bespoke, integrated software that they use with CCH Central.

While it could require only a day or two to migrate a small practice, for larger projects we may assign a project manager and technical consultant to work with your team throughout the project, from initiation through to completion, ensuring consistency across all stages of the project and all environments.

Your migration will also be backed by the collective resources of Wolters Kluwer, bringing a world of IT expertise to your practice. We follow a tried and tested methodology to identify and work with your unique configuration and requirements and ease the transition to a hosted environment:

• The right technical people are involved from the start, from Wolters Kluwer and from your organisation, to ensure the project is correctly scoped
• We gain a full awareness of how our component of the project impacts on your wider organisational goals
• For more complex projects, milestone dates are set for each stage to help meet your deadlines
• Your project team and ours work closely together throughout
• Where projects are set to extend over a period of time, regular review meetings ensure open and transparent communication is maintained
• Nothing is taken for granted. Everything is rigorously tested by ourselves and your project team before the go-live
• We’re committed to knowledge transfer, leaving you with easily navigable documentation of complex technical set-ups for future reference

The customer’s perspective

“Our sincere thanks for all your hard work on the migration. Achieving a successful migration was the key to allowing a whole chain of other work to go ahead in what is a very busy programme. You really worked with us as 'one team'.”

We recently assisted this large customer to migrate their complete CCH Central suite of software as a part of a wider project involving many other software products. We worked with their team for to migrate the suite from on-premise servers to a hosted environment consisting of over 70 servers across five separate environments, and then to migrate their data, first in test mode and then with live data.