Overview

The private, non-profit 501(c)3 child welfare and behavioral health agency (the “Agency”), located in Philadelphia runs nine office locations with one data center and an aging IT infrastructure. The Agency’s service offerings include adoption, foster care, behavioral health services, delinquent and dependent group home care for male and female adolescents, a community-based detention facility for pre-adjudicated male adolescents, and in-home services for at-risk children. Due to the highly sensitive nature of its protected patient data, SSI determined it would be viable to move their environment to a Virtual Private Cloud hosted within our data center.

Industry:
Non-Profit
IT Environment:
200 users, 1 data center, 9 office locations
SSI Services:
Server Support, Network Monitoring, Backup and Disaster Recovery, SOC/SIEM Security, 24x7 Managed IT Services
Technologies Used:
ConnectWise, Labtech, OpenDNS by Cisco, Auvik, Veeam, Citrix

Challenge

The Executive Director of the Agency was tasked with ensuring employees could access company data from any device, at any time. Unfortunately, after years of neglect from their previous IT provider, the organization ran an infrastructure that was beyond end-of-life in an environment that did not provide proper temperature control. This led to frequent outages, network performance issues, and bottlenecks that brought productivity to a screeching halt. With an increased need for their services throughout the Greater Philadelphia Area, it was determined that a more stable IT infrastructure would be necessary to adequately support their long-term growth goals. The Agency sought an IT provider who could document the best IT strategy for their needs.

Solution

SSI conducted an in-depth analysis of their current IT infrastructure. After meeting with various leaders at the Agency and running a cost analysis of both on-premise versus a cloud-hosted infrastructure, SSI concluded that a Citrix Hosted Desktop environment would make most sense. This would enable the Agency to decommission all local servers, avoid a costly hardware refresh, and transition to a cloud-hosted environment where they would only have to pay for the data center resources they consume.

Early on, SSI knew the Agency was interested in setting the standard in their industry, not just simply keeping operations running. While refreshing all the hardware locally was out of reach from a budgetary perspective, it was also determined that by moving to SSI’s Citrix Hosted Desktop Environment, they could achieve a level of performance and security beyond anything they could build locally.

To migrate the Agency to the SSI cloud, we deployed engineers to assist with building out the Citrix Virtual Private Network and then migrated all of their applications. Prior to cutover, our engineers met with each program leader at the Agency to validate application performance and quality assurance. Once it was determined that all applications were running faster on our cloud than they were locally, the Agency was transferred to our infrastructure with a seamless migration.

Results

The SSI Cloud Hosting Team was deployed on-site the day after cutover to ensure any potential end user issues would have a technical resource on hand to resolve their problem. Within the first year, the Agency was able to save more than $100,000 by migrating to a SSI Citrix Hosted Desktop Environment while also improving the user experience for all their employees.

After 90 days of running live on our infrastructure, a new government grant was awarded that required the Agency to disclose its IT infrastructure details. By leveraging SSI for a Citrix Hosted Desktop Environment, it was incredibly easy for the Agency to show third-party auditors that they were running an enterprise IT environment with built-in disaster recovery and business continuity.

SSI provided all supporting documentation for this grant award which was integral to the Agency’s long-term growth strategy. Today, SSI continues to work with the Agency and many others throughout the Greater Philadelphia Region.

Overview

The private, non-profit 501(c)3 child welfare and behavioral health agency (the “Agency”), located in Philadelphia runs nine office locations with one data center and an aging IT infrastructure. The Agency’s service offerings include adoption, foster care, behavioral health services, delinquent and dependent group home care for male and female adolescents, a community-based detention facility for pre-adjudicated male adolescents, and in-home services for at-risk children. Due to the highly sensitive nature of its protected patient data, SSI determined it would be viable to move their environment to a Virtual Private Cloud hosted within our data center.

Industry:
Non-Profit
IT Environment:
200 users, 1 data center, 9 office locations
SSI Services:
Server Support, Network Monitoring, Backup and Disaster Recovery, SOC/SIEM Security, 24x7 Managed IT Services
Technologies Used:
ConnectWise, Labtech, OpenDNS by Cisco, Auvik, Veeam, Citrix

Challenge

The Executive Director of the Agency was tasked with ensuring employees could access company data from any device, at any time. Unfortunately, after years of neglect from their previous IT provider, the organization ran an infrastructure that was beyond end-of-life in an environment that did not provide proper temperature control. This led to frequent outages, network performance issues, and bottlenecks that brought productivity to a screeching halt. With an increased need for their services throughout the Greater Philadelphia Area, it was determined that a more stable IT infrastructure would be necessary to adequately support their long-term growth goals. The Agency sought an IT provider who could document the best IT strategy for their needs.

Solution

SSI conducted an in-depth analysis of their current IT infrastructure. After meeting with various leaders at the Agency and running a cost analysis of both on-premise versus a cloud-hosted infrastructure, SSI concluded that a Citrix Hosted Desktop environment would make most sense. This would enable the Agency to decommission all local servers, avoid a costly hardware refresh, and transition to a cloud-hosted environment where they would only have to pay for the data center resources they consume.

Early on, SSI knew the Agency was interested in setting the standard in their industry, not just simply keeping operations running. While refreshing all the hardware locally was out of reach from a budgetary perspective, it was also determined that by moving to SSI’s Citrix Hosted Desktop Environment, they could achieve a level of performance and security beyond anything they could build locally.

To migrate the Agency to the SSI cloud, we deployed engineers to assist with building out the Citrix Virtual Private Network and then migrated all of their applications. Prior to cutover, our engineers met with each program leader at the Agency to validate application performance and quality assurance. Once it was determined that all applications were running faster on our cloud than they were locally, the Agency was transferred to our infrastructure with a seamless migration.

Results

The SSI Cloud Hosting Team was deployed on-site the day after cutover to ensure any potential end user issues would have a technical resource on hand to resolve their problem. Within the first year, the Agency was able to save more than $100,000 by migrating to a SSI Citrix Hosted Desktop Environment while also improving the user experience for all their employees.

After 90 days of running live on our infrastructure, a new government grant was awarded that required the Agency to disclose its IT infrastructure details. By leveraging SSI for a Citrix Hosted Desktop Environment, it was incredibly easy for the Agency to show third-party auditors that they were running an enterprise IT environment with built-in disaster recovery and business continuity.

SSI provided all supporting documentation for this grant award which was integral to the Agency’s long-term growth strategy. Today, SSI continues to work with the Agency and many others throughout the Greater Philadelphia Region.