Environmental technology company Doranova previously stored all its data on a physical server. This caused unnecessary friction in daily work, as much of the company’s job is carried out on customer sites where VPN connections would frequently drop.
Doranova decided to fix the situation by moving to the cloud and modernising its IT infrastructure with Tietokeskus.
An on-premises server made mobile work unnecessarily difficult
Most of Doranova’s work takes place on customer sites, which means connections must work reliably anywhere in the world.
This was not always the case. Just a couple of years ago, all company data lived on a physical on-premises server, and files and emails could only be accessed remotely via VPN.
According to Doranova’s Administrative Secretary, Virpi Alakoski, this made everyday work noticeably harder.
“The VPN connection was unreliable and slow. Our work sites are not always in well-connected locations, and mobile connections or USB modems often struggled to keep the VPN running.”
Relying on a single physical server also created a clear risk. If the server failed, all work would stop immediately. When the ageing server began to reach the end of its life, action had to be taken quickly.
A leap from on-premises to the cloud in just six consultancy days
It quickly became clear that moving to the cloud was the smartest choice. Doranova transitioned to Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 under the guidance of Tietokeskus.
“We made quite a digital leap. We got rid of the local server, and all our data was moved into Teams,” Virpi explains.
“We did this together with Tietokeskus, and that was absolutely the right decision. We held Teams workshops to map the current situation, our needs and the features we required. Then we built the whole environment and moved there in one go.”
– Virpi Alakoski, Administrative Secretary, Doranova
The schedule was tight: the decision was made in September, and all systems were up and running by mid-December.
In total, Tietokeskus needed just six consultancy days. The modernisation ended up costing roughly the same or even less than a new physical server – but delivered a far better result.
Moving to Teams also drove a shift in working practices
With the cloud, Doranova moved fully to SharePoint- and Teams-based communication, enabling new ways to guide daily work that were not previously possible.
“Our ways of working changed at the same time. We adopted the rule that work files are not stored on individual laptops, but in shared folders accessible to everyone.”
Office 365 has made teamwork and file access on the road significantly easier, and IT now adapts to the nature of the work instead of restricting it.
“Sharing and co-editing files has made things so much easier. Everything is up to date for everyone, and no one ends up with the wrong version,” Virpi says. She also highlights the value of expert support:
“My advice is that the move to Teams should absolutely be done with guidance. Tietokeskus showed us solutions we would never have found ourselves.” If we had tried to do it on our own, we would have missed out on a great deal of features that are genuinely useful in our daily work.”
Cloud services helped close security gaps
Despite common misconceptions, moving to the cloud almost always improves security. For Doranova – with its continuous product development – this was critical. Major steps forward were taken with Microsoft Intune and BitLocker.
The company also deployed MFA (multi-factor authentication), made smoother with Conditional Access, so extra verification is not required when logging in from a trusted device.
Disk encryption was addressed at the same time – something Virpi sees as essential, especially given the frequent business travel.
“Phones get stolen and things happen. We want to make sure no one can access our files.”
No need for a dedicated IT department
Doranova has no separate IT team. Virpi and her colleagues handle IT alongside their own jobs, which means everything must run as independently as possible.
After the cloud transition, support needs have dropped significantly, and Virpi can focus on her actual work.
Remote support now solves most needs, unlike before:
“With the physical server, most issues required someone to be on site, connecting a laptop directly to it,” Virpi says.
A dream infrastructure for any SME
In just a couple of months, Doranova was able to clear its entire development backlog – and today their IT environment is running at the forefront of what an SME can achieve.
Today, IT management is easy and predictable with a monthly fee: all data is in the cloud, daily work runs on Microsoft 365 Business Premium, and even devices are procured as a service from Tietokeskus.
“Previously our leasing agreements came from all sorts of different providers, and invoices arrived from everywhere. All that hassle is now gone.” With IT under control, Doranova can genuinely “take its hands off the wheel”.
“These tools make mobile work far more flexible compared to our old setup. Very often the VPN connection simply wouldn’t work, and the employee had to call me and ask if I could fetch a file and email it to them. That problem doesn’t exist anymore,” Virpi summarises.
“Tietokeskus has been able to point us to tools that are genuinely useful for us. That has probably been the biggest benefit: when we describe a problem, they find us the right solution.”
