Achieving Availability, Security & Mobility — Novatech Takes Courtesy Finance to the Cloud

With his IT vendor unable to support his company’s needs or ensure the uptime his workers required, Courtesy Finance President William P. Anderson knew his firm needed a change. One of Anderson’s top concerns was the security of the sensitive financial and customer information that his firm stores—and for which it must meet strict regulatory compliance – so an important requirement was the restricting of access to corporate resources, making available to each employees only that information needed to perform their jobs.

Having previously spoken with Novatech’s Vice President of Managed IT Services, Anderson decided to give Novatech a call.

The Solution

After evaluating the situation, the Novatech team recommended a cloud-based model, and Anderson liked what he saw. To secure his corporate assets against accidental exposure, the team recommended the Novatech Business Cloud, through which users access cloud-hosted apps and data through a secure online portal that works on any browser. The plan called for Novatech technicians to migrate the resources to cloud servers hosted at Novatech’s state-of-the-art, redundant data center. The technicians would also upgrade eight firewalls to increase network security from all office locations and transition the firm’s hosted Exchange email to the secure environment of Microsoft Office 365.

To ensure uptime and robust support for company personnel, Novatech recommended deploying 24 new desktop PCs to replace older equipment at Courtesy Finance’s nine locations in Tennessee and Georgia. Novatech would also provide 24/7/365 user support and network management, ensuring continuity and uptime in the offices. To showcase the new solution, Novatech generated a mock version of the Business Cloud portal and invited company personnel to try and break through. When his employees were stumped—Anderson was ready to proceed.

The Implementation

Novatech engineers created a parallel environment so Courtesy Finance users could experiment with the system before the actual migration. Novatech then performed the live cutover at night, switching everyone to the virtual server and deploying the new portal on all the PCs in a single effort, resulting in virtually no production downtime at all.

The Result

Anderson says he’s glad he made the switch. “We are a customer-facing company, and when customers walk in the door, we cannot help them if the computers are down,” he says. “With the new solution, our prior issues with support and reliability have gone away. Atlanta has a lot of IT providers, but many of them are just not that great. I have had a great experience working with Novatech.”

After the migration was complete, users worked through the learning curve quickly and now “everyone likes it. We have had no major problems and minor issues are fixed remotely by the Novatech support team, or they quickly talk our people through it.”

With the new solution, company personnel have total working flexibility when they travel. “We don’t need laptops anymore when we travel to our different offices as everyone can sign on to any computer at any office in our company.”

A final benefit, Anderson notes, will be the savings he anticipates. “We already knew we had to replace the old PCs, but because we were migrating to Novatech’s Business Cloud, the new PCs cost a lot less and are expected to last years longer. And with Novatech’s fixed pricing, we are also saving money on a monthly basis.”

The Future

Novatech is currently helping Courtesy Finance move to a virtual telephone system, Fonality, and Anderson says he is considering bigger projects for the future. “We are already talking about virtualizing our corporate office,” he says. “We could get it down to just a firewall and a switch!”

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