The Challenge
This SF Bay Area based non-profit real estate developer and property management firm focuses on providing affordable housing throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for seniors, low-income families, and people with special needs. Only about 20% of their 525 employees work from their headquarters. The rest, who range from property managers to service coordinators, who run job placement workshops, after-school programs, and senior services, are scattered across 135 properties.
With a predominantly remote workforce serving especially vulnerable customers, the firm initially contacted Xantrion 6 years ago for help developing a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. After Xantrion helped them migrate their data center offsite to a colocation facility, they decided to continue supplementing their in-house IT team with Xantrion’s resources and technical know-how.
The Solution
“We continued to meet with Xantrion biweekly for more than a year after our data center migration, so we knew what resources they could make available to us, and they knew what to suggest to improve our infrastructure,” says the firm’s technical architect. “In fact, a lot of our IT projects, including security enhancements and infrastructure improvements, have resulted from those discussions.”
For example, the firm’s robust Xantrion-designed backup system enabled it to bounce back from a ransomware attack. Although the attack destroyed roughly 15 percent of the firm’s data, the snapshot in the backup system made it easy to roll back systems so nothing was lost. In the process, Xantrion also suggested additional security tools, processes, and procedures to prevent similar attacks in the future.
In addition, when the firm’s IT team ends its 9-5 shift, it trusts Xantrion’s 24/7 monitoring to watch over critical systems, alert the appropriate staffers to alarms, and update them later about what happened and what needs to be corrected to prevent a recurrence. Xantrion also applies all security patches to the firm’s servers and workstations to free the in-house IT staff to focus on more strategic activities.
The Outcome
With Xantrion’s guidance over the last few years, the firm’s data center uptime has been close to the coveted “five nines,” or 99.999%. The firm has experienced no file server or email system outages in more than two years, it hasn’t had another ransomware attack in longer than that, and it’s currently implementing new procedures and processes that Xantrion has developed for new and evolving threats.
“Unlike other MSPs, Xantrion doesn’t just watch our systems, fix them, and walk away,” the technical architect says. “They bring us proactive suggestions to keep problems from recurring, and they constantly enhance our infrastructure with improvements and new technologies. I feel free to share my technology road map with them because they help us get to where we want to go faster and better than I could do it without them.”
