Rope Partner is the premier provider of wind turbine maintenance, inspection and performance enhancement services for major manufacturers and wind farm owners across the U.S., Asia, South America and Europe.
With 90 remote employees scattered across the world, the Rope Partner team relies on technology to keep a pulse on what’s happening in the field.
The company had recently initiated its cloud transition with an Office 365 migration. However, unhappy with the company’s IT support company, Operations Manager Nate Sanso sought out a more reliable IT partner that could guide the Rope Partner’s cloud strategy.
When repairing and inspecting wind farm blades, Rope Partner’s field employees need instant and secure access to information. Before working with Agile IT, Rope Partner experienced a few critical IT pains that interfered with operations:
Decentralized Information Sharing and No Offsite Backups
Rope Partner staff used five file sharing services, so employees struggled to track down critical documents. Email became the main mode of document sharing, which wasn’t a safe or efficient way to handle proprietary company information.
Because the company’s local servers weren’t backed up offsite, Rope Partner also risked data loss in the event of a local disaster.
IT Responsiveness and Reliability
Rope Partner relied on technology and data to analyze efficiency and bill clients.
For instance, technicians connected to CRM through VPN daily to detail work steps, document delays and log project time. Management used VPN to access file shares.
Any technology issue or delay affected company-wide productivity; IT was critical to smooth operations. However, Sanso was frustrated with the slow response time, generic IT plan and impersonal approach he experienced with the company’s IT support company.
“Our IT provider molded all clients into one package, which included services we didn’t need while raising our costs,” Sanso said. “We wanted to move away from a boiler plate IT package and seek an ongoing partnership with an expert in cloud technologies.”
Rope Partner needed a trusted IT advisor to analyze their infrastructure and operations, recommend hardware changes and find best path forward for upgrading or moving services to the cloud.
AgileCover Managed IT Support
When requesting IT support quotes, Sanso found that most companies offered one-size-fits-all plans. But like any mid-sized company, Rope Partner had budget constraints to consider.
The company had recently partnered with Agile IT to migrate to Office 365, centralize data access with OneDrive and SharePoint and enable single sign-on.
“Working with Agile IT for our Office 365 migration gave us a peek into how the company operates and type of service we could expect,” Sanso said. “Our contact went out of his way to tailor a solution that worked for what we needed.”
After an initial network discovery, Agile IT took over the following IT tasks for Rope Partner:
- Ongoing server monitoring and maintenance
- Anti-virus and anti-malware
- Security patches and server updates
- Hardware failure alerting for fans, hard drives, power supplies and heat
- Firewall management and maintenance
- Router and switch performance monitoring
- Service and performance degradations
- Server resource utilization and capacity
- Consulting support
- Network device monitoring
- Managed backup and data retention
“Responsiveness and technical savvy are the biggest advantage of working with Agile IT,” Sanso said. “Agile IT has been very responsive, and issues are escalated as needed.”
Data Backup and Retention
Before Office 365, Rope Partner email was hosted on Exchange, and employees used multiple shared file repositories.
Management needed a secure document storage service for proprietary information like work steps. Agile IT moved the team to SharePoint, which they now use to share data like processes, procedures, tracking documents and templates.
To protect critical information, Agile IT recommended cloud server backups for all data stored on the local server. This included the operating system, Active Directory database and locally stored files and folders.
By backing up local servers in the cloud, Rope Partner is safe from data loss and can confidently access critical company information regardless of environmental conditions.
By partnering with Agile IT for ongoing IT support and backups, Rope Partner was able to:
- Transform their existing IT infrastructure into a safe, stable and secure environment with minimal overhead
- Remove the burden of maintaining and updating operating systems and anti-malware applications
- Work with an expert in Office 365 and cloud technologies that can help the business scale and grow
- Free in-house resources from managing IT infrastructure
- Improve the return on investment of their current IT infrastructure
- Have 24/7 access to an enterprise-class helpdesk hosted by a best-in-class Microsoft Partner
“We leaned on Agile IT’s expertise to figure out a path moving forward,” Sanso said. “Cost and trust were the biggest advantages of working with the team.”
Now, Sanso looks forward to taking advantage of additional services available with his IT support plan, including weekly tech talks with an Agile IT engineer and ongoing training.
Sales@AgileIT.com