Client Overview
Industry
FMCG
Company Size
>200 employees
About Pickstock Foods
Pickstock Foods is a British meat processor specialising in the supply of quality lamb and mutton from UK farms only. As one of the biggest suppliers of pure British meat, animal welfare and meat quality are at the heart of the operation, and the business only works with farmers who operate to the highest standards.
Given the nature of the organisation – dealing with fresh meat – it operates in a fast-paced, time-sensitive environment, as any delays could lead to product spoilage. System availability and reliable connectivity are critical to production, logistics and business continuity. Downtime on the other hand directly threatens output, dispatch, and customer commitments. This operational reality is the thread running through every project Innovate has delivered.
The Challenges
Founded in 2020, Pickstock Foods grew during the second set of lockdowns during COVID. With many businesses shut, the meat processor was keen to buy the right-fit technology at the time but was limited to what was available. While the business bought brand new kit, technological progress and the reality of growing operations soon revealed the drawbacks.
Prior to 2023, there was neither an IT team nor deeper IT knowledge in-house. With IT Director Richard Stanyard joining the rapidly growing company, further gaps were soon discovered: The business had no useable backups on site, meaning it had gone for three years without them. However, there was also no security, an issue that urgently needed to be resolved.
The Challenges in Detail
- The Helpdesk ran on a single Dell PowerEdge T440 Hyper-V Host – failure would halt the business.
- Despite using Microsoft 365 cloud serves, data was neither protected nor backed up; email, files and collaboration data was exposed to accidental deletion, corruption, and ransomware
- The business ran a single flat Class C subnet for all users, devices and servers – wired and wireless. Continued business growth meant they were running low on IP addresses, affecting the availability of internal systems
- Pickstock Foods was relying on a single-point legacy firewall deployment which risked business continuity if hardware or a primary internet link failed
- Security features on endpoints were either only partially deployed or left in monitoring-only states, leading to a false sense of protection
All in all, systems had been working because they were new at the time of purchase, but no-one was overseeing the IT strategy or supporting the business on a daily basis.
The Solution
Richard Stanyard had worked with Innovate over multiple companies at many different sites, as they were the incumbent IT support at the time. As such, the IT provider had a keen understanding of the requirements of the food industry and was taken on board shortly after Richard joined the company.
With an underlying strategic long-term view, Innovate focused on transforming the progressively maturing IT estate from simply supported to resilient, then secure, and finally future-ready.
Onboarding gave Innovate full visibility of the estate and allowed them to identify any underlying risks, which drove a joined-up programme of business-continuity, data-protection, networking and security work, all delivered through a single, trusted managed-service relationship.
Helpdesk Onboarding
Replica Server
A dedicated replica delivering tested, rehearsed failover and genuine business continuity for the single Hyper-V host.
Backup for Microsoft 365
Network Configuration
A re-architected, VLAN-segmented network with separate wired, wireless and guest subnets, relieving IP exhaustion and improving security.
Firewall
High Availability Multi-ISP
Endpoint Hardening
Ongoing IT governance guidance, technical assistance and project management
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Key Takeaways
Challenges
- No in-house IT team, monitoring or documentation meant issues could go undetected and operational risk was unquantified.
- Production ran on a single Dell PowerEdge T440 Hyper-V host — its failure would halt the business.
- Microsoft 365 data was neither protected nor backed up, exposing email, files and collaboration data.
- A single flat Class C subnet was running low on IP addresses, affecting internal systems.
- A single-point legacy firewall risked continuity if hardware or the primary internet link failed.
- Endpoint security was only partially deployed or monitoring-only, creating a false sense of protection.
- With no-one overseeing IT strategy day to day, technology decisions risked falling out of step with a fast-growing business.
How Innovate Solved Them
- Onboarded the estate under managed support — deployed RMM across all servers, documented systems, and enabled network and external vulnerability monitoring.
- Deployed a replica with tested, rehearsed failover.
- Deployed backup for Microsoft 365 onto the existing server, backing up daily.
- Re-architected the network on VLAN segmentation and separate wired, wireless and guest subnets.
- Replaced it with new appliances, then clustered them across two buildings with primary, secondary and satellite links.
- Hardened around 50 Windows 11 devices via Microsoft Intune and Defender, validated independently with Nanitor.
- Ongoing IT governance guidance, technical assistance and project management as a long-term managed-service partner.
Business Outcomes
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Proactive, fully visible managed IT that replaced a reactive model and surfaced the risks the later projects resolved.
- Proactive, fully visible managed IT that replaced a reactive model and surfaced the risks the later projects resolved.
Genuine business continuity, with no single point of failure at the server layer. - Cloud data protected cost-effectively, closing a common backup blind spot.
- A scalable, segmented network with address headroom for growth.
- Always-on, next-generation perimeter security with full failover.
- Measurable, auditable cyber-resilience with improved Secure Score.
- IT strategy aligned to business goals, supporting 36.11% revenue growth since the start of the relationship.
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