Royal Signs, Inc - Case Study

Royal Signs, Inc is a 8 employee company, in Englewood CO, specializing in fabricating custom 3-dimensional signs and illuminated signs.

Royal Signs called Colbatech to help with concerns surrounding security, backup, reliability and productivity of their IT related system.

Royal Signs was concerned about unauthorized access to their network from the outside. They also did not know if their data was being reliably backed up. Lastly, access to their billing and accounting services was often slow and unreliable.

Security

Royal Signs

Royal Signs was concerned about outside access to their network. They only wanted individuals authorized to access their data to be able to see it from outside the company. Colbatech Solutions did a full security audit looking at networking equipment, servers, laptops and workstations. Colbatech shut off any unnecessary features that could potentially be exploited. Any unneeded remote access software was turned off or removed from all of the machines. All administrative passwords were changed.

The result was that all outside access was cutoff to the company except to those specific individuals that required remote access to their respective work machines.

Backup

After Colbatech analyzed Royal Signs backup, it was determined that several improvements could be made:

1. Not all of the important data was being backed up.

2. At any given time, it wasn't always known if the backup was properly functioning or not.

3. Some of the data was only being backed up on-site where there was no redundancy in case of a natural disaster.

4. Some of the data had no backup history. You could not restore back farther than one day.

Resolutions:

A combination of Backblaze and Amazon S3 backup solutions were used to make sure the whole organization was properly covered in the case of a disaster. Backblaze was used to backup individual machines holding databases storing important business information. Amazon S3 was used to backup a network attached storage device containing all of the company documents. Both solutions provide a minimum of 30 days of backup history (meaning if a file is discovered as missing 29 days after it has disappeared, it can still be recovered). Also both solutions provide reporting. Royal Signs receives an email each day telling them if a backup succeeded or failed. If the backup fails, then the problem can be quickly investigated and resolved. Before there was no way of knowing if a backup was continuing to work day in and day out without checking manually.

Lastly, both backup solutions are cost effective and scale well as the company's data grows.

Reliability and Productivity

Royal Signs relies on its core billing, accounting, email and printing software to do business day to day. Access to these systems was often slow and unreliable.

Colbatech Solutions addressed these issues in the following ways:

1. Machines holding key services were upgraded to provided more resources for critical services to run better.

2. Machines that did not require replacing were tuned-up to squeeze maximum performance out of these systems.

3. Enterprise-grade email was implemented to allow seamless sync of email, calendars, and contacts between computer and mobile devices.

The Result:

Employees at Royal Signs are now able to get more work done in less time as they are able to access services that used to take a long time to load very quickly. They have computers that load faster and allow employees to spend less time waiting and more time getting work done. Royal Signs saved money by squeezing the most out of the less critical machines without having to repurchase all new computers.

By upgrading to more robust email, employees are now more productive on the go as they can check their schedules from anywhere. When they delete an email on one device it deletes it on all devices. When they read an email on one device they can see that email has already been read, even if they look at it later from somewhere else.