SAGE is a growing residential development and investment firm in the Baltimore/Washington DC corridor. As they’ve acquired new properties, they’ve also acquired a hodgepodge of disparate IT approaches that couldn’t interface with each other and required staff to have a different sets of skills and knowledge to maintain the various systems. Additionally, they found themselves paying multiple vendors for overlapping and sometimes redundant services. At one point, they were a victim of a cyber attack and in need of increased security.
More recently, the challenges of COVID-19 meant that employees needed to work remotely.
Standardize Everything
First, we developed solutions that would work well among all properties and all employees and could easily be adopted for new acquisitions and hires. Because all employees are now using standardized hardware and networking solutions, efficiency is up. We also enabled employees to work remotely with no increase in IT costs. And now they know exactly what they’ll need for the next hire or property acquisition and can budget accordingly.
Vendor and Tools Audit and Adjustments
We conducted an audit of all services and vendors. We were able to reduce the sheer number of paid services and renegotiated other plans and contracts to significantly decrease costs. For example, one property had four different Comcast accounts, which we consolidated into one, saving over $400 per month. Then we switched their company-wide file sharing service from Dropbox to Sharepoint and Onedrive, which saves $1,200 per month.
Telework Solutions
When COVID-19 mandates suddenly required remote working, we purchased laptops, set up remote access, and configured their phone system so team members could receive calls at home. We accomplished all of this within a week and there was no increase to IT operation costs.
Network Security
We implemented phishing and spam mitigation and significantly increased email security. These measures continuously protect SAGE from security breaches. Furthermore, we investigated the previous cyber attack and provided the necessary information that proved that SAGE was not at fault to their insurer.
Quickbooks Hosting and Security
We set up and maintain a server which hosts their Quickbooks account. We’ve implemented restricted access to the server and back it up daily.