Overview
A financial consulting firm (the “Company”) coordinates complex investments in public market securities, private equity, and other alternative investments for institutional investors. The Company’s IT infrastructure was neglected for years by their previous vendor. The Company had experienced continuous network performance issues, file storage problems, and an inability to respond adequately to an outage. Through an extensive evaluation process, SSI was selected as their new IT partner with the task of executing an in-depth assessment of the current infrastructure along with providing a detailed technology roadmap for the next five years.
Industry:
Financial servicesIT Environment:
25 users, 3 servers, 3 network devices, 1TB of dataSSI Services:
User Support, Server Support, Network Monitoring, Backup and Disaster Recovery, SOC/SIEM Security, 24x7 Managed IT ServicesTechnologies Used:
Connectwise, Labtech, Auvik, Office365, Veeam, Perch Security, BackupifyChallenge
The Company had been utilizing a small and local IT services provider when the vendor became unresponsive to service requests and unable to provide a long-term strategy for regular improvement of their IT operations. As a result, the Company’s Director of Operations spent most of his week managing IT issues, support tickets, and researching new technologies that may or may not benefit the Company. SSI performed an initial assessment and documented a 5-year technology roadmap, in addition to providing 24×7 Managed IT Services for the on-premise IT infrastructure.
Solution
After performing the initial IT infrastructure assessment, SSI determined that the Company’s local network devices, including routers, switches, and firewalls were all beyond their end-of-life. In order to ensure optimal network performance, SSI concluded that the highest priority to tackle would be a network refresh of their local hardware. During the network refresh, it was soon apparent that their current backup and disaster recovery strategy was quite insufficient for their business requirements.
Multiple customers were requesting documentation regarding backup and disaster recovery plans to satisfy their business continuity requirements. SSI was able to provide a local backup, with offsite disaster recovery replication, to satisfy even the most stringent third-party auditor demands.
Results
The Company quickly realized that SSI was the right fit for their IT infrastructure needs. Instead of utilizing a small IT provider who was reactive instead of proactive, the Company’s leadership now relied on SSI and could stop putting out fires and start focusing on their long-term technology and business objectives. After a thorough evaluation of an initial three-month period, the Company was running an up-to-date IT infrastructure with much better performance and resiliency. Through regularly scheduled quarterly business review meetings, the Company now has a clear picture of the overall health of their network and has the necessary insight for future projects.