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Case StudyCompany profileSmall/Medium size company was established in 1994, and one of the leading recycling companies in the eastern U.S.Revenues in 2003: $11.5 million40 employees over 4 offices throughout the USBusiness situationCompany moved their headquarters from Austin Texas to Miami Florida while rolling out new remote offices in other states.Technical situationAPS Express moved their headquarters from Austin Texas to Miami Florida.? The growth plans included opening remote offices throughout the USA.? For years, they had been using a home-type peer to peer network without a real server.? They had a bookkeeper that was remote and primarily used Quickbooks via LogMeIn to a Windows XP computer in the main office.? The bookkeeper also kept vital accounting documents and spreadsheets on her remote computer.? The local users in the main office also accessed Quickbooks on the same computer. ?Their process required that remote offices fax paperwork for each shipment to the main office which required the main office.? In addition, all users had gmail email addresses.? There was little or no security on any of the PC’s so users were allowed to waste time going to inappropriate websites.? There was a very rudimentary backup that only seldom worked correctly that no one was checking for completion.RequirementsSenior Management quickly recognized that in order to sustain the future growth of the company, they needed to implement efficiencies in their processes that required a solution to revamp their IT infrastructure. ?The solution requirements were:Little out of pocket capitol costs.Must be very secure and cannot be affected because of hurricanes in Miami.Have a true, high performance and very secure server centrally managed that all the offices could access.Implement a web site filter for all offices limiting staff to only access business appropriate web access.Implement a data backup system that provided near continuous backups that backed up multiple times per day and kept a two week retention.Had to be able to add remote offices into the IT infrastructure quickly and easily with little or no capitol costs.Little technical knowledge to roll out remote offices to avoid IT technician costs at the remote sites.Consolidate Quickbooks and important documents and spreadsheets where that staff could access with a simple click.Provide a scanning solution where the remote offices would simply load the paperwork required into a scanner, press “SCAN” and the documents automatically be placed into a folder on the server in PDF format.To have the entire solution completely functional in 2 weeks.SolutionSenior Management consulted B2B Cloud Solutions to review the requirements and provide a solution and Proof Of Concept.? B2B provided the following solution.Setup a server in the Cloud that was accessible by all staff members regardless of location and regardless of device (PC, iPad, iPhone, Mac, Android Phone).The B2B Cloud is in a geographically different data center completely protected from weather or power outages. The entire data center is replicated to another data center located in another state in case the primary data center goes down.Setup web filters on all remote locations so that even if there was no management supervising staff, there would not be any inappropriate web browsing or chatting (Facebook, Adult etc.).Configured the server to be backed up multiple times per day and keep a 14 day retention.? In addition, if the backup failed, an immediate alert would be sent out to support for quick resolution.Remote offices can now be brought online immediately rather than waiting for complicated systems to be put in place and without any technical knowledge.Quickbooks was installed on the server pursuant to Intuit’s recommendations and the company files were moved into the Cloud.? Now multiple users could access Quickbooks without it crashing several times per day.?Instead of non-technical users in the remote offices sending faxes to the main office for the documents, a scanner was installed that could scan directly into the folder required by the accounting department to access it.BenefitsCompany now has a very inexpensive, reliable and secure IT environment to allow them to grow at the pace they want. Their staff is now much more productive since non-business web habits have now been blocked. They can rely on a true data backup so that if they need to restore, they can do so from as little as 15 minutes prior to a crash.Issues affecting headquarters such as hurricanes or power outages do not affect the other offices.Products and services your company usedB2B Cloud ServerB2B Hosted Email SolutionB2B Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery SolutionB2B Cloud Web Filtering ServicesB2B Cloud Monitoring and Alerting System ................
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