Pandemic highlights strength of IT firm’s solutions for new world of work
By Annabel Cooper
Having flexible, secure, world-class IT systems with expert trouble-shooting on the end of the phone has never been more vital than it is right now. When companies and organisations suddenly needed to operate remotely, many turned to Oxygen to help them achieve this.
“For our existing clients, it was easy to transition them over to a home working solution because they were already set up in our data centre, so already hosted within the Oxygen cloud environment and platforms,” says Benjamin Smith, technical sales consultant at Oxygen. “This enabled them to go to remote working seamlessly.”
In addition to managed IT and data centre hosting, Oxygen also offers telephony services as well as full suite of IT support services for businesses, including home workers that provides monitoring, security management and anti-virus management. “We have a very responsive IT technical team,” he says. “The average time to get through to a technician at Oxygen is seven seconds.”
An immediate challenge to overcome was communication and one of the biggest concerns from potential customers was their phone systems.
“Our phone system allows clients to work 100 per cent remotely, which was ideal for customers that were stuck overseas during the pandemic” continues Mr Smith. “They can use their PC web browser or cellphone app or take their office phone, and connect to their router or Wi-Fi at home and have a fully functioning office. They can keep this same number wherever they are in the world.” This is a huge advantage over legacy phone systems which don’t allow for this.
Oxygen is very much a Bermudian-based company. Not only does it employ ten people on the island, but all their servers and voice systems are hosted here too.
“The cloud services we provide are hosted in the QuoVadis data system in Bermuda,” he explains. “We run our own cloud service for our customers so that they can access all their documents, applications and files from wherever they are. This means there is no latency when using certain applications and it is just like working in the office.”
The company is the only SOC 2 Type II managed service provider in Bermuda. This accreditation means that Oxygen’s security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy standards meet the stringent guidelines of the American Institute of Certified Public Accounts.
Oxygen has, says Mr Smith, “different solutions for different sizes of company”, and their clients range from banks, large insurance companies and government organisations to smaller businesses with just a couple of employees.
While the last 14 months have seen considerable demand for their remote working platforms, he does not think this will subside, even once the pandemic does.
“I can see people working from home in the medium and long term,” he says. “It will become more prevalent and normalised, so having systems that cater to that will have benefits.
“The nature of cloud products is the way that we seem to be going,” he continues. “You’re able to essentially set a fixed monthly cost for all of your IT to prevent spiralling costs, and cloud services by their nature are very scalable so it allows you to future-proof your business.”
