Public Accounting Company

About the Client

With 13 branches, 16 partners and 300 employees, this public accounting practice serves clients throughout Kansas. Its services include bookkeeping, payroll, wealth management, and estate and tax planning. For more than 70 years, their certified public accountants have been servicing clients from many different industries in the area.

Pain Points

In one of the firm’s locations, servers were approaching end of life in the next fiscal year, leaving the systems more vulnerable to viruses and failures. With a small IT staff supporting 300 employees, the CIO was frustrated with having to manage not only end-user support, but also all the backup, testing, and maintenance for seven locations.

Another pain point was that the company did not have a best practice DR plan in place. The organization desperately needed to mitigate the risk of downtime from an unexpected event. According to their findings, if the firm experienced any downtime during the non-peak season, the business could lose about $16,000 per hour. During peak or tax season, the company could potentially lose about $31,000 per hour. With nearly 70% of the organization’s revenue coming in four months out of the year, the firm needed to ensure that its production environment was secured with a robust business continuity and disaster recovery plan.

Solution

RapidScale provided the firm with CloudRecovery (DRaaS) and CloudBackup (Backup as a Service). The company’s production environment was kept secure in RapidScale’s Tier 3 SSAE 18-certified data centers with a four-hour RTO and near real-time RPO. RapidScale’s fully managed cloud services enabled the CIO to offload managing the second data center to the RapidScale team.

Additionally, the company received a dedicated team that performed all nightly backups and testing, which saved the IT team about eight hours of weekly maintenance. Through RapidScale’s professional services, the firm’s IT staff was able to focus on supporting its employees and on more strategic projects. 

Why They Chose RapidScale

A significant differentiator was RapidScale’s ability to provide a secure network without having to replace any of their existing infrastructures. RapidScale’s engineering team had extensive background and knowledge of VMware Horizon, the company’s virtual desktop infrastructure. Thus, the company was able to trust RapidScale with their production environment. While other competitors bidding on this deal couldn’t demonstrate their understanding of the company’s VDI, RapidScale had the capabilities to manage their VDI in the event of a disaster. 

Another major differentiator was RapidScale’s ability to build a solution that specifically supports the firm’s critical business applications. By taking the time to understand how their business works, RapidScale was able to provide disaster recovery and backup strategies, giving the CIO peace of mind that their business would be well taken care of in the case of an outage or security breach.