Business growth is exciting—after all, it indicates success. But there’s a downside, too: the IT challenges that come from trying to keep pace. Read on to see how MicroAge recently helped a company get a handle on things with IT managed services.
For a growing private ambulance company on the West Coast, the business strategy of growth through acquisition was making it hard for the IT side to keep up.
MicroAge’s Dustin Wood recently had an opportunity to help the client’s director of special projects and a procurement manager give their data center a much-needed upgrade.
“These guys knew there was a problem, but because they aren’t IT guys, they didn’t know exactly what the problem was,” Dustin notes.
After going on site, Dustin saw several issues.
“They started as a small company, but they had grown so big that their infrastructure just wasn’t what it needed to be,” Dustin explains. They also were lacking the IT expertise to manage and maximized their technology.
Without the right data center infrastructure and personnel, the company’s IT would continue to flounder, incurring unnecessary costs while exposing the organization to risk.
One of Dustin’s first recommendations was to utilize a MicroAge services partner to function as the company’s outsourced IT department for the short term.
In just 20 minutes the IT managed services partner fixed an Exchange server issue that had plagued the company for more than six weeks.
“Then, we started laying out different IT projects during a whiteboard session,” Dustin says. For six months, MicroAge will act as the client’s IT department and implement about 50 projects. These include:
- Virtualizing the data center using HP ProLiant servers, VMware vSphere with Operations Management Enterprise Plus and Citrix NetScaler
- Deploying Citrix NetScaler networking
- Upgrading to Cisco switches
- Implementing a security solution using Cisco (Security hardware, IPS, advanced malware protection and URL filtering)
- Utilizing a hosted managed backup system
- Adding Ubiquiti UniFi access points for wireless
- Managing Microsoft 365 licenses
At first the client was wary of the cost of having outside IT managed services, but the company has seen the returns. They now acknowledge that it’s worth every penny.
Part of that satisfaction stems from engaging in bigger-picture planning, which was a welcome change.
“We really took into account their plans for future growth. We understand their business, and we brought in team members to expand their capabilities,” Dustin says. “They weren’t at an enterprise level before. But they are now.”
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