An Outdated and Ineffective Situation

Opkalla worked with a marketing and advertising agency located in North Carolina that has more than 50 employees engaged with national and international Fortune 500 customers. While their agency and workload were growing, their internal IT team was limited.

Further, this agency’s original IT solution was antiquated, hardware-based, located on premise, and did not provide sufficient backup for all mission critical data. The solution was also non-scalable and ineffective in meeting the recovery requirements of the business.

Further complicating to the situation, the solution was supported by the agency’s long-time local managed service provider (MSP), who was not able to support the new applications and technology the agency needed to grow.

This created the need to find a new MSP that could support expansion plans along with a managed cloud service provider to support new business objectives. These external resources would also help to relieve the understaffed internal IT team of additional workloads.

Additionally, the agency was now more reliant on Microsoft® 365 (M365) email, OneDrive and SharePoint applications that contained data not protected by Microsoft®. It was important to the agency to maintain ownership of this data as well as increase retention of it in order to meet industry best practices.

The Solutions Lies in the Cloud

Opkalla worked with Sky Data Vault (SDV) to identify and review the agency’s on premise server recovery and retention requirements and M365 data needs. Two SDV Managed Cloud Services were identified as viable solutions.

For the servers located on the premises, a managed hybrid Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution provided full backups of mission critical files and folders with the added feature of a full recovery option located on the premises and in the secure SDV Cloud. For the M365 applications, SDV provided a managed M365 Backup solution which gives the agency complete control and recovery of their M365 data.

SDV’s White Glove Implementation made the transition both fast and seamless for the agency, requiring as little as 30 minutes of their time. With SDV providing strong and resilient backup and DR support, the MSP can focus on the production environment, help desk support, and implementation of new services. The diversity in suppliers mitigates risk and improves flexibility, giving the agency peace of mind.

In total, the collaboration among Opkalla, the agency and Sky Data Vault took only two weeks from start to finish. An impressive feat compared to the timeline most organizations face when procuring new solutions.

Benefitting from the New Solution

Through this project, the agency now:

• Possesses a fully flexible and scalable data protection service without adding to their IT team’s workload
• Has beneficial cloud services while maintaining existing technology budgets and saving CapEx dollars
• Enjoys peace of mind through better mitigated risk and improved resiliency from multiple service providers

The Helpful Role of Opkalla's Trusted Advisors

Just like in all of our client engagements, we exist to make the research and procurement process easier for organizations. Through our work with this agency, we:

• Demonstrated how a diversified managed services strategy adds resiliency and eliminates single provider service risk
• Reduced workload for the agency’s internal IT team by eliminating IT service management, allowing them to focus on business-driven technology
• Introduced a solution comprised of local and national providers that was not accessible to the agency

We’re glad to have played an important role in enabling the agency to confidently implement growth initiatives with full Sky Data Vault support.

Want to hear how Opkalla can help your team sort through IT solutions and identify cost savings to pay for them? Let's start the conversation today.