The Challenge
Doubling in size in less than a year left this San Francisco Peninsula based biotechnology firm struggling to provide consistent, reliable IT services to all of its employees. Maintaining an in-house IT team wasn’t practical for a company with a laboratory and office in California, a manufacturing facility in Kansas, and a remote sales team scattered throughout the country, but its IT provider didn’t provide 24/7 support across time zones, and paying for IT support by the hour had the firm’s IT costs growing as fast as its business. When the biotech firm needed more support and security for its cloud-based infrastructure than its provider could deliver, it realized it needed a new IT partner capable of scaling with it.
The Solution
“We’re a cloud-first company, so we needed high-level expertise from people who could make all of our cloud-based systems work together,” said the firm’s director of operations and IT. “Xantrion gives us a virtual CIO.”
Xantrion Certified Support services provide remote system configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting from a single central location for the firm’s employees nationwide. With support available around the clock, employees can get help quickly—often resolving issues in the same day. Support requests can also be escalated to someone with more expertise at any time so employees can return to full productivity sooner. Xantrion’s 24/7 service also makes it easier to onboard more new employees in less time—a critical consideration for an organization that expects another growth phase soon.
After recent analytics showed that the company was increasingly a target for hacking attempts, it added Xantrion’s Managed Security to improve information security. “As we grow, we’re becoming a larger target, so we wanted to put more sophisticated IT processes in place to fend off hackers before they affect us, for both security and compliance reasons,” the director of operations and IT said. “And unlike other providers we talked to, Xantrion includes the cost of recovery from an incident in our monthly fee.”
The Outcome
Today, the biotech firm is paying less and being more productive, with around-the-clock support, a dependable enterprise-wide cloud infrastructure, and protection against data loss all included in a predictable flat fee. Xantrion’s pricing structure and business model also make it easy for the fast-growing company to plan for the large number of new hires it expects to onboard and support in the near future. And finally, Xantrion is also helping the firm focus on internal strategy and management.
“Xantrion’s help in defining our IT processes has made us much more efficient,” the director of operations and IT explained. “We had to walk through and document all our processes so we could hand them over to Xantrion to establish a formal help desk. That obviously freed us to focus on strategy and management. But more than that, it’s also helped us identify and document issues so that we can address them and keep them from recurring.”
