Client story Construction Technology Company Moves Major Application Infrastructure to a Managed Services Model
By Insight Editor / 20 Apr 2021 / Topics: Disaster Recovery (DR)
Facts at a glance
Client industry
Construction
Insight provided:
- Comprehensive enterprise-class environment design
- Data center hosting in Insight-owned facilities
- Migration to Insight-hosted data center and private cloud
- Enterprise backup and DR with cloud backup services
Insight services:
- Disaster recovery
- Managed Cloud
- Data center hosting
- Data center migration
Outcomes:
Download the client story
- Reliable and streamlined backup and DR
- Improved infrastructure capacity and performance
- Scalability and simplicity to support future growth
- Reduced management burden on internal IT
- Improved ability to deliver on uptime commitments
The client
The client is a leading provider of construction information and technology solutions, delivering several world-class pre-construction software solutions in one business model. With a mission to transform the way the construction industry conducts business, the company’s Software as a Service (SaaS) platform seamlessly connects subcontractors, general contractors, manufacturers, and other construction professionals with relevant projects and resources. Employing more than 1,000 people across 13 locations in the U.S. and Canada, the company’s reach includes more than one million registered users reporting on more than 600,000 projects.
The challenge: Getting out of the data center business while delivering on uptime commitments
At the onset of our engagement, the client’s SaaS platform was running on legacy data center technology in a colocation facility in Atlanta. The business had grown significantly in the five-plus years since the client stood up its SaaS solution, and capacity and Disaster Recovery (DR) challenges, plus the need for a hardware refresh, brought the client’s IT leaders to a stark realization: They needed to get out of the data center business in order to remain effective.
Rather than simply moving forward with a hardware refresh, the client decided to focus on the outcome of consuming infrastructure rather than buying and managing it internally. The hope was that moving to a hosted cloud and data center with a managed services model would solve three main goals: removing the internal burden of infrastructure management, adding in a reliable DR component, and ensuring that the environment serving the client’s business-critical application is equipped to deliver on the uptime commitments extended to end users.
The solution: Streamlined, scalable data center infrastructure with Insight Managed Services
While the client had received proposals from two competing solutions providers, one of whom listed a significantly lower monthly fee, the client ultimately chose Insight for the three-year project because of the transparency and trust built early in the process. Sitting down with the client’s IT decision-makers, our team had the opportunity to walk through the itemized proposal, illustrating each component’s role in delivering an enterprise-class environment licensed compliant to the products included in the service and built to ensure the applications it hosts will support end users, and thereby the client’s business, with consistent, reliable performance.
Our proposed solution leverages Managed Services for a collaborative model Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) engagement wherein our teams manage everything up to the hypervisor, including the hardware layer, VMware® layer, networks and backup processes.
Our Managed Services for the client include data center services and privately hosted cloud services. Insight-owned facilities in Roswell, GA, and New Albany, OH, now house a total of 30 dedicated client hosts. The Insight team is providing all compute, storage, and network infrastructure across both sites, one of which is dedicated to production. The second location is dedicated to DR with an enterprise backup solution using our cloud backup services.
To move the client’s current-state environment from its existing data center into the private cloud, Insight is leveraging Zerto’s platform for replication. When replication is complete, our teams will work with the client to test the application to ensure functionality and begin the failover process.
The benefits: Improved IT bandwidth and capacity for continued business growth
The Managed Services solutions delivered from Insight have reduced the time, effort, and money client IT teams have had to spend on internal data center decisions and management, improving their ability to focus time and effort on business innovation. The Managed Cloud and hosted data center solutions from Insight are also delivering the scalability, resilience, and simplicity the client needs to meet consumer expectations and support continued growth.
The client is already pleased with our team’s ability to provide a right-sized solution that will properly meet uptime requirements and other business goals. While this IaaS engagement is still in an early phase, the client has already requested proposals for add-on services and has begun considering leveraging a similar strategy for additional business applications and facilities.
