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Case study: Getting a grip

Taking a managed services approach allowed one organisation get a grip on its infrastructure, as MATTHEW SAINSBURY found out.

Managing IT systems and staff is a massive trial for any business, but when you’re experiencing growth through expansion and acquisition it’s even more challenging. Taking a managed services approach allowed one organisation get a grip on its infrastructure, as MATTHEW SAINSBURY found out.

Managed services provider, Netforce, was called in to streamline one organisation’s IT assets, after the customer found itself struggling to keep track of everything while experiencing strong growth. The financial services organisation has 80 people spread across three locations. Netforce’s mission was firstly to clean up the IT systems running, and then engage in strategic discussions with the customer in order to meet its growth needs and prevent the systems from falling into the same state of disrepair.

“The customer wanted to solve a number of ongoing IT problems that the company that it was working with previously was not really addressing in an efficient manner,” said Netforce director and CTO, Scott Atkinson.

“They seemed to have people coming onsite a lot to address problems, but those problems kept occurring, so there wasn’t any permanent solutions put in place – it would get the problem fixed for a day but not forever.”

Step by Step

The first step in the solution was to rollout a management platform across all systems, both in the headquarters and remote offices, Atkinson said. Kaseya’s Web-based system provided PC remote control and support, audit, automated maintenance, patch management, network monitoring and alerts, software upgrades, network policy enforcement and integrated reporting. Netforce also implemented some WAN and Internet management tools.

“We rolled out Kaseya throughout the environment to get a baseline audit done, so we could understand what the situation was and that pulled up a number of interesting patterns across the organisation – a mix of things that weren’t properly patched or weren’t up to date,” Atkinson said. “These are the kinds of things that are difficult to find out on a manual basis, but following the rollout it was easy to run a report. Once everything was up to a reasonably stable level, it tended to fix a lot of the little things.”

During the process, Netforce also discovered a great number of inefficiencies, Atkinson said. Once visible, these proved easy to remedy.

“First of all, we were able to run a software audit to show what they were running across the organisation – it wasn’t entirely clear what people had on their machines before that – and we were able to make sure that licences were properly allocated to the right people,” he said. “Some people had machines with software installed with licences that they were never going to use, while other people were saying ‘we need this software, but we don’t want to buy another licence’. We were able to better balance out some of the software licences.”

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Security gaps

More significant were the security flaws the customer was experiencing prior to the rollout and clean up, Atkinson said.

“From a security point of view, it was vital to get all the latest patches and antivirus updates across the organisation sorted out – it’s stuff that seems fairly basic but if it’s not done properly it can cause some problems,” he said.

From there, the next step for Netforce was to begin engaging the client in strategic decisions, having moved beyond providing a break/fix level of service.

“Now we have a solid foundation which allows us do a health check on where the organisation was, as well as give them instructions and timeframes for fixes and updates,” Atkinson said. “Once all of that was done, we were then able to start having strategic discussions around where the organisation wanted the business to grow to and what systems will cater to that.

“We needed to look at the growth plans, otherwise there was the risk of running into problems like what was present before as the organisation adds more users and fill up resources.”

The initial rollout of the solution across the organisation occurred over a half day, and was fairly pain-free, according to Atkinson.

“We didn’t run into any difficulties that weren’t anticipated,” he said. “We know that certain things take more time than others, and of course we needed to organise and schedule time after hours when we wanted to bring down servers to apply patches or bring them up to date. But nothing really jumps out to say it was a problem – it was one of the things that has shone through among everything that has happened for us – providing you do it in a controlled manner and don’t try to be a cowboy about it then it’s good.”