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“With Reliable IT, you get their experience of working and implementing tools in multiple environments, so it’s rarely the first time they’re doing something when they’re installing it in your environment.”

When you have your own internal IT team that only works with your environment, all they get to know and see is your environment. It’s been a huge benefit having Reliable IT on board, because they’ve already gone through the executing implementations out of the gate and the lessons learned from those.

Prior to Reliable IT, we experienced outages for a variety of reasons, but the impact to the company was significant, based on network design and certain limitations to servers and infrastructure design and understanding. We were a totally flat network, so anything that happened to our Golden office where our servers were on-prem shut down the rest of the company as well. We also had performance issues, because our only outbound internet was routed through our main facility. Therefore, each facility didn’t have its own access to the Internet, so again if anything happened, our entire company was down. With Reliable IT coming on board that was one of the first gaps that we addressed. We put in a redundant MPLS network across all sites; each site now has its own internet access completely. We migrated our servers from an on-prem solution to a data center that has the backups and the systems to run a larger infrastructure like ours. It also gave us the flexibility that if we do have a power outage in one of our facilities, or if something else outside of our control happens at any of our facilities, that facility is isolated without impacting the rest of the company. The other thing that the network design did for us, in segmenting the network correctly, was allow our support teams the ability to diagnose and troubleshoot problems faster. It’s been a beneficial relationship for us thus far, and we’ll see where it continues to move. Where Reliable IT has also helped us is in providing virtual CIO services, so it really helps us source solutions better.

The quarterly reviews that we do also help us line up the strategic IT plan with the business plan. We don’t need to shuffle priorities, we don’t need to move things in different directions, but if we do, we’re all agreeing to it and we’re moving as a single solitary unit, which has been great. Reliable IT has really been embedded into our culture.  For an IT company that is an outside, outsourced organization, you can’t expect anything better. The bulk of our IT support is actually done remotely.  Being able to contact an IT person over the phone is easy, and having a helpdesk queue just answer it, whether they’re here in front of you working, you know you’re sharing resources.  This makes response times go down, and their ability to troubleshoot the systems is the same as if they were on-site. If they just want to do a regular phone call, they can do that. They can get the information they need from the end-user while still making the end-user feel as if they are being heard. That’s one of the gaps that I think a lot of people have as an area of concern.  How do you provide support remotely, but still make sure your teams and staff feel like they are truly being cared for. With Reliable IT and the way they handle remote support, we haven’t had those problems.