Prairie Contractors, Inc. – General Contractor
Prairie Contactors, a general contractor and construction services company, had the goal of transitioning their IT Services and Tech Management away from break/fix hourly IT Support to Managed IT Services.
THE CHALLENGE
Prairie Contractors had gotten into a common scenario of piece meal IT support, where they would call when they had issues. That type of IT delivery had gotten them to a scenario where the client didn’t want to call for tech support because of the associated cost, backups and server updates were neglected, email and other server roles were buggy and creating workflow issues and remote users had difficulty because of a lack of a plan and support. Prairie needed an IT scenario that fit their budget while also converting all of their integral IT needs, which included:
- Ensuring that all Computers, Servers and Networking Devices were updated and kept secure and supported
- Setup spam filtering to reduce spam delivery and less the likelihood of network intrusions via email
- Create a cost effective solution for providing access to necessary IT support by setting up a set monthly for all routing support and maintenance
- Checking on backups and disaster recovery to ensure core business functionality had redundancy and failure alerting
- Maintaining and alerting of their internal active directory server and Exchange server services
- Educate staff on new IT delivery method and simplify access to their tech support
THE SOLUTION
With a signed Managed Service Agreement in place, LME worked with Prairie admin staff to formulate a schedule where LME staff could implement Prairie’s new I.T. delivery system. The cutover went as follows:
- LME purchased RMM agents and Anti-Virus licensing for all of the computers and servers
- Purchased and setup cloud spam filtering solution EveryCloud and then made the appropriate hosted DNS changes to have email routed through smarthost
- LME purchased and installed cloud backup for the Prairie servers and configured email alerts to notify necessary staff of backup failures
- Configured alerting to notify relevant staff when internet was down
- Schedule a date when all remote Prairie staff would be in area, and install RMM & AV tools and left a shortcut to the LME helpdesk page on their desktops
- Setup patching schedule with RMM tools to ensure devices remained up to date and setup alerts for devices that were out of date
- Informed users that all IT support was now covered and taught them how to reach out to LME staff for support
- Fixed outstanding network and server issues like Outlook credentials pop-ups and wireless issues so as to leave Prairie in good working around and creating a standard where client now anticipates all I.T. functions to perform as expected
THE RESULTS
With the help of LME, Prairie Contractors successfully migrated their IT delivery from a break/fix scenario where many aspects of their network were neglected because of budgetary concerns to a scenario where Prairie has all the integral aspects of their network supported and covered for a reasonable monthly budget
