Case Study: Industrial Sector

Client
A multi-location Canadian manufacturing company with decades of experience levering advanced processing capabilities in the energy industry. This company’s enduring success comes from relentlessly focusing on perfecting its technology and its customer service.

The Problem
Although successful in innovating unique, differentiated processing technology, this company’s IT infrastructure was on shaky ground. Not that they knew it. After all, they had recently invested in top-tier servers, storage, networking, and back-office applications. They had purposely opted to purchase a more expensive “high-availability” IT environment.

The business leaders had entrusted IT design and support to a small local firm that provided ad-hoc services on a time-and-materials basis. This seemed to serve the business well in the past. However, reliability issues began to mount. Then, one day an after-hour alarm from a processing machine went unnoticed because essential IT infrastructure had gone offline. The cascading effect of this incident damaged the processing machine and the products it was processing, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars of loss.

F12’s Solution
F12 was referred in by an investor connection and performed a health check of the IT environment. The results were alarming. The complex, high-availability solution was badly misconfigured, resulting in several single points of failure. Worse, the backups hadn’t run in months. Worse still, the months-old backups were stored on the same array as the operating environment. In reality, both the redundancy and the backups were an illusion. A single failure would have forever wiped out all the company’s systems, data, and backups.

Fortunately, the business had purchased all the right equipment and software to have a robust, modern IT environment. It simply needed to be configured correctly and then properly managed on an ongoing basis.

F12 began with a project to ensure reliable offsite backups were working. Once that was in place, F12 reconfigured the IT systems to function as intended, performed validation, and generated suitable IT documentation. Once remediation was complete, the business enrolled in the F12 Select program to have ongoing monitoring, maintenance, support, and expert advice.

The Result
This business prides itself on its process technology innovation. Partnering with F12 has enabled them to keep their focus on their business differentiator, leaving the nuances of the underlying IT management to a trusted expert. The overall end-user support experience and the cyber security posture are greatly enhanced. Most important of all, they have the reliability, scalability, and confidence they need to continue growing for decades to come.

This organization appreciates counting on F12’s proactive approach rather than counting line items on their IT invoice.

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