One of our engineering clients was founded in Kansas City, Kansas and has been headquartered there since early 2002. At first, they worked primarily in civil engineering and lighting design services, but now they have multiple disciplines, with a focus on surveying. A culture focused on leadership, mentorship, and community outreach helped them grow to over 70 employees in 3 different offices throughout the Midwest region.
Their success turned into explosive growth and their IT infrastructure simply couldn’t keep pace. Despite their best efforts, their rapid growth caused workflow issues, data storage problems, individual site network restrictions, and security concerns.
The Problem
One of their main services is using remote robots to survey sewers and capture significant amounts of CCTV video data. As a result, they struggled with moving data from remote sites to a central location over a traditional VPN model. They had accumulated 17 TB of data and only half was backed up on external hard drives. Not only was half of their data not backed up, but their backups were rarely tested, and they had been hit with multiple viruses over the years. If disaster were to strike, it would’ve been detrimental to their business. At a minimum, they would have had extensive data loss, and worst case they might have had to shut their doors.
Their explosive growth forced them to re-examine their overall IT strategy, especially now that they had grown to 3 sites across the Midwest. Leadership wanted the entire company to feel as one connected office, but these sites felt disconnected and separated from one another.
The Solution
They chose CompleteCloud to help secure and scale their IT infrastructure. The CompleteCloud Platform centralized all of their site’s data and in the process even discovered 5 terabytes of unknown data from a remote server and employees’ local PCs. This centralization allowed their expanding CCTV data to be uploaded into secure remote servers that replicated the CompleteCloud data centers, so all sites could access it, providing a customized workflow for their unique operation. To further connect each site, we layered in our voice, chat, and video communication solutions, helping them feel as one cohesive company.
Results
Once again, they feel like one unified organization. The company is better able to communicate and work with each location now that all their servers, virtual Desktops, high-end CAD graphic systems, data backups, and even phones are hosted in redundant data centers. Since adopting the CompleteCloud Platform, they moved their headquarters and didn’t have access to their office for two weeks. During those two weeks, their work was not inhibited. With centralized data and virtual desktops, they flawlessly used CAD and GIS programs from home with no performance degradation. Transitioning to their new building was effortless and smooth.
Additionally, their data needs continued to grow and were quickly outgrowing the current server infrastructure. To address these issues, we built an entirely new server structure to keep up with their growing data demands. This type of project would’ve been extremely expensive, costing at least $150,000 with any other IT vendor, but it cost them $0 on the CompleteCloud Platform.
