The Situation
Aflame install and maintain fire suppression and safety systems, which means most of the team is out at customer premises rather than sitting at a desk. Their IT had grown up around that without anyone ever standing back and designing it.
There was no documentation of any kind. Devices were ageing with no replacement plan. Licences were being paid for month after month that had never been deployed to anybody. And the incumbent provider was reactive — things got fixed when they broke, but nothing got better, and nobody was thinking a year ahead.
The trigger was a batch of newly acquired laptops that needed to reach company systems from customer sites. The existing remote access arrangement was not built for how the team actually worked, and was particularly poor on tablets in the field.
What Was at Stake
For a field-based business, remote access is not a convenience. If someone on site cannot get to the information they need, the visit either takes twice as long or has to happen again — and the customer sees both.
Underneath that sat a quieter risk. An estate nobody has documented cannot be secured, planned for, or handed over. Every month it continued, the eventual cost of untangling it grew, and the business was carrying a single point of failure it could not see.
The unused licences were the visible symptom: money leaving the account every month for something nobody had ever switched on.
What We Did
We did not start with the laptops, even though the laptops were the reason we were called. We started with the audit, because choosing a remote access approach before knowing what was there would have been guessing.
Users, devices, systems, licences and risks — written down for the first time. This produced the licence finding immediately, and gave us a basis for every decision afterwards.
The conventional route would have required on-site server infrastructure Aflame did not have and had no other reason to buy. We ruled it out rather than sell them a server to solve a problem that did not need one.
We validated a zero-trust approach against real network conditions — the connections the team genuinely works over, not a clean office test. A solution that works in the office and fails on a site visit is not a solution.
An interim arrangement stayed in place during the change, so at no point was anyone in the field without a way of reaching what they needed. Nothing was switched off to force the migration along.
The highest-priority items from the audit were addressed in order of risk, alongside the remote access work rather than queued behind it.
Priority findings were closed within days of the audit being completed. The work happened around the working day, with no interruption to site visits or customer commitments.
A few hours from someone who knew how the business really operated, decisions on how people would sign in, and approval of the access we needed. We handled the rest, including the incumbent.
The Outcome
“The communication has been excellent throughout, and it genuinely feels like POLARIS are an extension of our team.”
Microsoft 365 for identity, mail and data, with device management and security applied to the new laptops. Tailscale for zero-trust remote access, chosen precisely because it needed nothing on site to terminate against.
The engagement began as a scoped piece of Consult work with no obligation beyond it. Aflame subsequently moved onto a managed support agreement, and the documentation produced by the audit is what that service now runs on.
Published with written consent from Aflame Fire Services Limited, covering the company name, the description of the work and the quote as it appears above. We publish no network detail, access rules or addressing for any customer.
Related
The agreement Aflame moved onto — what is included, the service levels and how onboarding runs.
Learn MoreHow we replace legacy VPN arrangements, and when we use zero-trust rather than a firewall.
Learn MoreScoped work against a written statement of work — how the audit that started this was delivered.
Learn MoreThree named studies and one anonymised summary, filterable by situation.
Read ThemNext Step
No documentation, a provider who only turns up when something breaks, or a team who cannot reach what they need from site. Tell us which and we will tell you what it takes to fix.
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