One business,
several front doors

The second site is rarely a copy of the first. That is the problem — and it compounds with every site after it.

Sites drift apart unless something holds them together

Most multi-site IT problems began as sensible local decisions. One office bought its own server. Another kept a different broadband provider because it was cheaper at the time. A third has a folder structure only its manager understands. None of it is wrong on its own. Together it means no two sites work the same way, nobody can say with confidence who has access to what, and a head-office figure depends on somebody emailing a spreadsheet.

One desktop, wherever the person is sitting

The cleanest answer for most multi-site businesses is to stop letting the building decide how someone works. A hosted desktop gives every member of staff the same applications and the same files at head office, at a branch, at home or while covering another site for the afternoon.

There is no local copy at each address to fall out of step, and no separate server in a cupboard at every site to patch, back up and eventually replace. When a site floods, loses power or simply loses its broadband, the work moves with the people instead of staying in the building.

One identity, one set of permissions

The second thing that goes wrong across sites is access. It is almost always more open than anyone intends, because it grew site by site:

Connectivity you can reason about

Sites still have to reach each other and reach the cloud. We keep that deliberately simple: resilient business connectivity at each address, secure links between sites where they are genuinely needed, and a fallback so a branch can keep trading when its main line fails. Where a site is small, the honest answer is often good internet and a hosted desktop rather than an expensive private circuit, and we will tell you that rather than sell the circuit.

Opening, acquiring or closing a site

A new branch should be a known piece of work, not an improvisation: connectivity ordered early enough to matter, equipment built and tested before it ships, accounts created in advance, and someone reachable on the first morning.

An acquired business is harder — two sets of systems, two email domains, two sets of habits — so the merge is staged rather than attempted in one weekend, and trading never stops while it happens. iKORE has been handling these moves for UK businesses since 2015, alongside day-to-day managed support and cyber security.