Click this fun animation to see how ISG supports IT teams with managed services and infrastructure solutions. Our experts help you manage innovation projects such as shared storage, virtualization, disaster recovery, security, mobility and UC collaboration projects.
Check out this brief tour of the ISG regional network of data centers.
DCI provides full-service bank technology and processing solutions to the financial industry. Headquartered in Hutchinson, Kansas, DCI’s advanced banking solutions include the iCore® bank processing and management system, imaging, Internet banking, networking, teller automation, ATM/card services network, and backroom services. In 2008, iCore won the BankNews Innovative Solutions award for the Best Management Software Solution.
Hundreds of community bank clients count on DCI for core information processing services. With virtually all of their financial transactions reliant on the DCI system, bank clients require around-the-clock application services in conjunction with comprehensive information protection. Bankers also look to DCI for innovation and continued cost efficiencies to help maintain competitiveness in cautious financial markets. But managing critical systems for a demanding and growing client based posed mounting challenges, according to Robert Ross, VP of Network & Technical Services at DCI. “It became increasingly time consuming and labor intensive to protect rapidly expanding volumes of mission-critical financial data and continue to satisfy the time and efficiency needs of modern banks.”
A growing client base, increasing systems complexity, and demands for higher levels of Business Continuity and DR caused DCI to re-evaluate its approach to providing services to its clients.
Virtualize servers on VMware®, deploy multiple NetApp® storage arrays, and automate Disaster Recovery.
John Jones, CEO of DCI, had high praise for the ISG solution. “Moving to the VMware on NetApp environment allows us to deliver near real-time business resumption service to our clients. Whether it’s empowering remote employees with virtual desktops, delivering the processing services clients need to support mobile banking, or providing complete IT services via a private cloud, we have the technology in place to be agile, innovative, and competitive.”
Robert Ross summarized, “By providing full IT services to de novo banks, for example, we can nearly eliminate their initial IT capital investments and staffing requirements. We also help reduce risk. In an age of increasing regulation, offloading compliance and other processing and data management complexities can be a huge advantage for client banks. We now see tremendous opportunity to expand our value to a broad spectrum of bank clients.”
DCI provides full-service bank technology and processing solutions to the financial industry. Headquartered in Hutchinson, Kansas, DCI’s advanced banking solutions include the iCore® bank processing and management system, imaging, Internet banking, networking, teller automation, ATM/card services network, and backroom services. In 2008, iCore won the BankNews Innovative Solutions award for the Best Management Software Solution.
Hundreds of community bank clients count on DCI for core information processing services. With virtually all of their financial transactions reliant on the DCI system, bank clients require around-the-clock application services in conjunction with comprehensive information protection. Bankers also look to DCI for innovation and continued cost efficiencies to help maintain competitiveness in cautious financial markets. But managing critical systems for a demanding and growing client based posed mounting challenges, according to Robert Ross, VP of Network & Technical Services at DCI. “It became increasingly time consuming and labor intensive to protect rapidly expanding volumes of mission-critical financial data and continue to satisfy the time and efficiency needs of modern banks.”
A growing client base, increasing systems complexity, and demands for higher levels of Business Continuity and DR caused DCI to re-evaluate its approach to providing services to its clients.
Virtualize servers on VMware®, deploy multiple NetApp® storage arrays, and automate Disaster Recovery.
John Jones, CEO of DCI, had high praise for the ISG solution. “Moving to the VMware on NetApp environment allows us to deliver near real-time business resumption service to our clients. Whether it’s empowering remote employees with virtual desktops, delivering the processing services clients need to support mobile banking, or providing complete IT services via a private cloud, we have the technology in place to be agile, innovative, and competitive.”
Robert Ross summarized, “By providing full IT services to de novo banks, for example, we can nearly eliminate their initial IT capital investments and staffing requirements. We also help reduce risk. In an age of increasing regulation, offloading compliance and other processing and data management complexities can be a huge advantage for client banks. We now see tremendous opportunity to expand our value to a broad spectrum of bank clients.”
When a St. Louis area bank needed help with a sluggish WAN, they turned to ISG for help. When the lines at Midwest BankCentre started to grow unusually long due to a sluggish network and unresponsive business applications, Larry Albrecht, senior vice president of operations, thought he knew the answer—a new T1 connection.
“We’re a midsize community bank here in the St. Louis area,” said Albrecht. “We do not have a large IT staff. So, when we need help with our technology we typically turn to an outside provider.”
Because Albrecht had already established a good working relationship with ISG Technology, he brought his network bandwidth issues to them for help. “When Larry first contacted us about his problem he was sure that they needed to add a new T1 line,” said Shanon Lightle, account executive at ISG. “I asked him if he would allow us to run an assessment of his network first to determine what his exact problems were before he invested in a new T1 connection. Thankfully, he said ‘yes.’”
With Albrecht’s blessing, a senior network engineer with ISG installed a PacketShaper from Blue Coat to assess their network performance issues. What ISG discovered was eye-opening.
“The basic problem was that we had limited to no visibility, or control of our network,” Albrecht said. “But bandwidth wasn’t our biggest problem.”
The PacketShaper that ISG installed also provided them with a granular level of insight into the bank’s Internet usage during business hours. That’s where they discovered two things. “First, we discovered that a portion of our problem was caused by employees checking their Gmail, updating Facebook and watching YouTube videos, bogging down what bandwidth we had available.” said Albrecht. But this wasn’t their biggest challenge.
“Not only was our connection to corporate email and file sharing running slow,” he said, “but our business application that supports our client account creation and modification was practically unusable, causing updates to client accounts to take, on average, about 15 minutes.” These two issues combined to create long lines at the bank counter and a lot of unhappy clients.
In response to these concerns, ISG installed a Blue Coat Mach5 WAN Optimization solution, which allowed Albrecht’s staff to drastically reduce the size of their business data and file transfers, and increase their bandwidth by 90 percent.
In addition, files and applications that previously required more than 15 minutes to open and update were now responding in fewer than 60 seconds. ISG also deployed a Blue Coat PacketShaper to allow Albrecht and staff to begin shaping their recreational traffic and set maximum thresholds giving priority to business applications. The business results were dramatic. Lines got smaller. Clients smiled more often, and employees at the bank got their work done faster and with less stress. Albrecht was pleased.
“We talked to a couple of different IT service providers about our need for a better solution to our bandwidth problem,” he said, “but we went with ISG primarily because we were comfortable with what we’d experienced with them in the past.”
As happy as Albrecht is with the results, he’s quick to admit that the project had its share of road bumps along the way. “I’ll be real honest, we ran into a few snags with this, when our NetApp SAN application encountered some issues. But ISG was quick to involve NetApp’s engineering team to address that problem,” said Albrecht. “It was gratifying to know that ISG’s relationship with the vendor allowed them to get such a quick response to our problem. ISG did a very good job of jumping on the issues and dealing with frustrations as we encountered them.”
Thanks to ISG’s assessment of the bank’s network, Midwest was able to increase client satisfaction, address their bandwidth issues, and optimize their business applications to improve responsiveness and regain control of their network.
“What I like about ISG is that they’re not a large, anonymous company,” said Albrecht, “and when I call them I’m not talking to an operator in an enormous call center who creates a trouble ticket and maybe calls us back in a few days. Instead, I know that ISG will take my call and respond quickly. They’re very consistent and they’ve shown great interest in establishing a long-term working relationship with our business.”
If you’d like to talk to someone at ISG Technology, Inc. about how they can help your business improve efficiency and address network issues like these, please feel free to call (877) 334-4474 or visit them online at www.isgtech.com.
As a client service-oriented radiology practice in Missouri, Advanced Radiology was feeling the pain. “Stability and speed are crucial to our ability to provide services to our patients and their physicians,” says James Aldridge, Director of Radiology for the company. “We had reached a point where our existing infrastructure would inhibit our growth unless we invested a significant amount of capital into a dozen new servers, storage devices and software.”
“ISG helped us implement a major network upgrade with virtual servers in a secure underground environment.”
James Aldridge, Director of Radiology, Advanced Radiology
Many businesses serving the healthcare industry are experiencing similar challenges. With new, rapid technological growth mandates, there’s a constant need for providers to upgrade to newer equipment and software. “The cost of equipment and the rate of change can cause not only an increase in capital expense, but a human expense in terms of training and time,” says Matt Jost, ISG account executive. “Technology has become a consuming factor for many healthcare providers, and that can distract from their core business focus.”
To help Advanced Radiology break through their barriers, ISG was able to test and evaluate their systems and propose different scenarios. “ISG’s knowledge and flexibility allowed us to tailor a solution that fit our budget and address each of our unique challenges,” says Aldridge. To start things off, ISG performed a complete network evaluation to determine best practices for the environment, taking the human element into consideration along with power, cooling, physical space and regulatory restrictions.
Based on the results of this evaluation, and the necessary requirements to meet the client’s business goals, ISG proposed two solutions. “One was to build out an internal data center with a virtual infrastructure,” says Jost. “The second was to reduce capital costs by migrating their IT infrastructure toward the ISG Data Center Service.”
“ISG helped us implement a major network upgrade with virtual servers in a secure underground environment, all connected to dual fiber rings, with a solid disaster recovery plan,” says Aldridge. “During this transition, we experienced very little downtime. They were able to simplify our backup process and help tighten our security.”
The results were better than either ISG or Advanced Radiology could have hoped for. In addition to the improved reliability and the elimination of outages, ISG’s Data Center Service has provided the client with additional flexibility for virtual assets. It’s also enabled migrations to new and more productive software solutions, minus the downtime.
“Advanced Radiology has a newfound agility thanks to the ISG Data Center,” says Jost. “They can add users, servers or other virtual assets within minutes,” he says, “and all without making a capital expenditure.”
The client couldn’t agree more. “ISG was able to update us to newer server technology, including both hardware and software,” says Aldridge. “With a newer operating system implementation, we were able to speed up our networks. ISG has been instrumental in our ability to continue our growth and migrate into newer systems.”
Are you interested in learning more about how switching to ISG’s Data Center Services could help your business thrive? Contact your ISG representative today.
Founded in 1927, The Bama Companies, Inc., is an innovator of wholesome bakery products, such as hand-held pies, biscuits, buns, pie shells, and pizza crust. Bama serves the Quick Service Restaurants, Fast Casual, Casual Dining, and Broadline Channels of the Foodservice Industry for the largest, most well-known restaurant chains on the planet.
Bama had aging PC’s spread across their environment; they were experiencing high support costs, and needed an efficient and cost-effective plan to refresh their PC fleet.
In addition, they wanted to enhance the performance of their user associates Windows desktop environment.
They were also looking for ways to improve process management and deliver secure desktops to their manufacturers and outside the company to employees around the world. Finally, Bama hoped to provide users the same environment across various remote devices.
Eric Spille, Manager of Technical Services for Bama, turned to ISG Technology for assistance with this company-wide project. ISG worked out a program to move the company to Citrix XenDesktop Enterprise so that desktops could be delivered virtually to associates.
ISG conducted an initial pilot with 25 users to provide a proof-of-concept. Based on that success, Spille decided to expand the XenDesktop solution out to all users.
With ISG’s expertise, Bama installed redundant Citrix NetScaler controllers as access brokers to enhance the XenDesktop delivery and significantly improve the user interface. Additionally, Bama’s Exchange environment is secured by the NetScalers, which handle the security and access processes now. The Netscalers keep their data safe.
Bama replaced old desktops with thin clients for an immediate cost savings and a reduction of their total cost of ownership. Refresh cycles were extended from four to eight years, which doubled the lifespan of their hardware—at half the cost.
“What made everything easier for us was the impressive level of Citrix expertise at ISG,” said Spille. “ISG knows Citrix really well. We felt very fortunate to have access to someone of that caliber. I don’t think anyone in this area even comes close.”
User experience was improved. “We can provide our employees with a Windows desktop with 12 seconds of login,” said Spille. “That’s impressive.”
Bama also experienced several incremental benefits. “While our main goal was to put a thin client at everyone’s desk, we always struggled with patches in the past,” said Spille. “This new upgrade allowed us to provide over 300 users with a single image. That’s a huge savings and process improvement for us.”
Thanks to the Netscalers, Bama also experienced an increase in data security. Executives and sales associates who access Bama’s network remotely—regardless of device—are only viewing the data they need, without having data reside on the local device itself. Company data remains safely in the data center.
Bama was impressed with ISG’s commitment to the project. “Having a single point of contact really helped the project run smoothly. Hal Davey was truly an advocate for us. ISG asked the right questions,” said Spille. “This allowed us to proactively avoid issues, and get it right the first time.”
While a separation of responsibilities is necessary to keep focus within an organization, it has a major downside: The boardroom is often left in the dark concerning IT issues. Executives should be taking an active role in tech maintenance and advancement within the company, and one of the great ways they can go about doing this is through IT-as-a-Service.
To that effect, let’s take a look at the top three things the boardroom should know about ITaaS:
“CIOs think their IT teams should be 58 percent bigger.”
The first – and perhaps most important – reason why the boardroom should consider ITaaS is the fact that many business IT departments are overworked. A study conducted by Robert Half Technology found that CIOs don’t think they have enough employees to effectively get the job done. In fact, the survey discovered that CIOs think their IT teams should be 58 percent bigger than they currently are.
While this makes for a stressful work environment, the real problem with this situation is the fact that stretching IT employees too thin can be dangerous for a company’s data health. PandaLabs, a cybersecurity research collective, observed and neutralized nearly 84 million unique pieces of malware in 2015 alone. That accounts for more than 27 percent of malware observations made by PandaLabs, which shows just how hard hackers are working to steal private information. Leaving something like malware removal to an already understaffed, overworked IT team is clearly just asking for trouble.
Building a network for an organization is a very personal experience. IT workers pride themselves on creating a network from the ground up, but problems arise when these employees get too grounded in their routine and begin to overlook certain aspects. Working with a system for a long time allows blind spots to develop, and it’s often advantageous to have an outside professional come in and assess the situation.
A good example of this has to do with the security of company data. An IT administrator working with the local network might focus on educating employees about phishing scams or ensuring that all software is completely updated, but might miss the fact that users are accessing network data through unencrypted means. A network assessment from an outside MSP can help to plug these kinds of holes.
Making sure a network is running as efficiently as possible is a major concern.As a rule, IT workers are highly skilled individuals. But, as the above examples show, sometimes they need a little help. This is especially true when implementing a new technology plan, such as a bring-your-own-device policy. With Forrester Research predicting that organizations the world over will be using 200 million BYOD smartphones in 2016, it’s clear this is an important trend.
Although BYOD has amazing benefits like reduced hardware costs, it certainly has its downsides. Compliance standards often have strict regulations regarding BYOD, as allowing employees to bring devices from home increases security concerns. Organizations looking to implement such a policy might not be able to foresee all the problems that need addressing, and therefore might increase the risks of a data breach or even downtime. Working with an ITaaS provider such as ISG Technology can mitigate these risks, helping to ensure a smooth BYOD rollout.
