IT Services and Support for Houston Businesses

Prior to Reliable IT coming on board, we experienced outages and a variety of reasons for those outages, but the impact to the company was significantly larger and based on network design and certain limitations to servers and infrastructure design and understanding. We were totally flat network, so anything that happened to our Bolden office where our servers were on-prem the rest of the company shut down. We also had performance issues, because our only outbound internet was routed through Golding. Therefore, each facility didn’t have its own access to the Internet, so again if anything happened, your entire company is down if that main facility was done.

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 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 and not the rest of the company. The other thing that the network design did for us, in segmenting the network correctly, it allowed 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 helped us is providing virtual CIO services, so it really helps us source solutions better, the other thing that it does is when you have your own internal IT team that works with your environment and your environment only, all they get to know and all that really see is your environment. Whereas working with Reliable IT, they get the 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. Therefore, they’ve already gone through the trouble and the pain of executing implementations out of the gate and the lessons learned from those.

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 sort of been embedded into our culture as an IT organization that for 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 easy, having a helpdesk queue just answer it, whether they’re here in front of you working, you know you’re sharing resources. Which 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 areas of concern, it’s 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, the way they handle remote support we haven’t had those problems.