Everyone loves Lego, especially the team here at VMhosts, so when moving to the new office we decided to take on a mammoth build – to design and build the new office in Lego form!
To make it a bit more interesting, and useful, each of the rooms are a representation of the different services VMhosts offers – everything from Disaster Recovery to Modern Data Centre. The process started by finding a Lego designer – we can build, but haven’t quite got the skills to master the design of such a big building. Next, we sent over photos and videos of the building from many different viewpoints so that the designer could reproduce every last inch of the building – even including water in the pans of the toilets if you lift the toilet lids up! Once the design was created it was on to sourcing all of pieces – around 11,000 in total! This was also a task in itself as we had to buy from many different sellers to source all the bits we needed, which also lead to hours of fun doing an inventory of all the orders when they started arriving to ensure we had everything needed to start the build. Armed with just under 2,000 pages of instructions, the build began…
Walking through the front door you’re greeted by the reception area, the curved brick wall and a door through to the toilet area. Our ground floor focuses on our Hardware, Modern Data Centre, Back Up and Cyber Security service lines.
Our downstairs meeting room has a minifig surrounded by boxes as he’s busy configuring new hardware that has been sourced ready to be sent out to a customer.
Next up is our 1st warehouse filled with servers including the blinking lights, to signify our private cloud platform. In our real warehouse we use this space for building out solutions for customers and testing all components prior to shipping the configured hardware ready for install. Our cloud platform is actually hosted in 3 top spec datacentres!
You’ll then find our 2nd warehouse which has racking for holding spares and components for customers and features a podium to signify the 3, 2, 1 rule of backups. You can be in the winning position if you have 3 copies of your data, 2 types of media and 1 off site, all powered by Veeam!
The last office is protected by cameras, knights and a firewall whilst the guards in the office are conducting penetration testing and vulnerability scanning for our customers to ensure they’re not on the verge of attack.’
There’s a choice of a staircase at either end of the building followed by 3 offices which represent our Management and Support, Consultancy and Disaster Recovery service lines, and then the most important part – the kitchen and staff room!
Our Management and Support service is the office filled with minifigs at their desks with the Network Operation Centre screen not in view – customer confidentiality of course! The team are working on a variety of issues from infrastructure management to performing Microsoft 365 health checks to general IT queries for some of the customers we provide in-house Managed Services for. With an average ticket response time of under 10 minutes, our Service Desk Team is always busy.
Next up is the Board Room with mini-figs deep in conversation around the Board Table. We have developed an IT strategy for our customer that fits their business needs now, and also incorporates room for business growth. Many of our customers are hybrid workers so we always ensure our solutions are flexible, enabling employees to work anywhere.
You can then see the one of the most important rooms in the office – the kitchen and pool table with staff taking a well earned break. We currently have a pool tournament running but won’t give away who is top of the leader board currently!
Lastly our Sales and Operations office has been transformed into Disaster Recovery with an explosion and fire on one of the desks – scary stuff! Even though we have a fire, all of our systems are safe and secure as we maintain replicas of our systems in a separate, secure location – something we offer our customers too!
Next project – build the roof and solar panels…
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As businesses move to agile mobile solutions such as Office 365, cyber criminals are exploiting this choice, to many Office 365 is new technology platform. Once a business has migrated key services to these always on services they become dependent on their availability and make the assumption the platform is secure by default.