We support an organization with 350 employees and 20 locations across the state of North Carolina with fully outsourced IT support solutions.

Need:

The client had a full-time IT Director on staff for a number of years, a local contractor on site performing moves and changes and a professional outsourced IT Help Desk. The IT Director outsourced specific projects to local IT companies as needed. Users were not getting any support, equipment was purchased and never used, and the company was spending thousands of dollars on services they didn’t need.

The executive management team had difficulty executing on its mission because of the number of IT issues and a lack of transparency on what was really going on. Eventually, management parted ways with the individual and began to seek outsourced support. They eventually selected Netsafe to perform the day to day support, to take control of their IT infrastructure, provide a technology roadmap, and optimize their capital and expense budgets.

Solution:

Netsafe proposed a full outsourced support plan. The plan includes a technician on-site every day, access to a business hours Help Desk support and full network design and project management services.  This solution eliminated the IT director, the hourly contractor performing moves and changes, and the 3rd party Help Desk company. Essentially, the company collapsed all responsibility to one team and saved approximately 32% in operating costs compared to their current support model.

Netsafe inventoried the infrastructure, internet costs, wireless costs and printing costs. 

First Step:

• Determined that the back-ups had not been run in over six months and the server hosting the business critical application hard drives were corrupted. Implemented new backup strategy and repaired the servers.

• Engaged a third party to review all of the wireless expenses across the organization. The consultant determined he could save the company approximately 40% in the first year by optimizing the plans.

• Engaged a third party to review all of the printing expenses across the organization. The company determined they could eliminate thousands per year by collapsing the number of vendors from three to one and by deploying standard printers throughout the organization.

• The performance of the inter-site corporate backbone was unacceptable as the users were unable to complete basic job functions. Netsafe sized, negotiated, coordinated, and completed the installation of an overlay network until such time the corporate backbone contract expired and could be canceled.

• Implemented a standard laptop and desktop for refresh. Found that most of the field personnel only needed very basic capabilities and therefore rolled out refurbished laptops at a much lower cost per unit as compared to new. As each computer is deployed the asset inventory database is updated.

• Invoiced all purchases to the cost center level allowing the cost center owner full transparency to see for the first time their costs where previously they were masked through the process.

• Implemented monthly Executive Service review to make sure the strategies were aligned, action items were moving toward closue and that Netsafe was performing to their corporate satisfaction.

Second Step:

• Moved all users to a Citrix environment. It allowed ease of access to a standard set of applications and forced the users to save their information on the servers, so it could be backed up and accessed in the event the user were to leave (employee turnover averages 30% per year).

• Site by site audit of the communications lines. Netsafe found a mix of vendors at each site and many services that were being contracted for and not being utilized., i.e., contract with new vendors and not disconnect the old.

• Performed a cost analysis to show a move to a Cloud-Based VoIP telephone system both saved significant money as well as improved productivity. Savings were derived by eliminating site based phone systems, traditional telephone lines, and domestic long distance charges.

Benefit:

• Significant cost savings derived by standardizing services, outsourcing the management of specific services to industry experts, auditing the services to eliminate duplication and optimizing services based on current market offerings.

• Improved service levels by reviewing performance metrics on a regular interval with the Executive Team.

• All critical data is backed up, monitored on a nightly basis and multiple days are retained.

• Network performance was improved considerably at a more cost effective rate.

• Users access the network in a simplified, uniform way to allow the use of common applications and to ensure user data is backed up.

• Executive team aligned the IT resources to support their corporate mission.