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Case Study – State Industrial Streamlined to the Cloud—and Cut Costs —with Ntirety’s Help

State Industrial Products has helped customers “Care for Work Environments” since 1911, creating state-of-the-art cleaning and chemical solutions for disinfecting, odor control, water treatment, laundry, and a variety of other purposes. Serving government entities and organizations in the healthcare, food service and hospitality industries, State Industrial operates across the United States, deploying employees far and wide to help the company’s clients achieve their goals. 

In 2015, State Industrial approached Ntirety to help evolve the company’s infrastructure by making a multi-stage move to the cloud—first starting with a migration from on-premise servers to managed hosted Microsoft Exchange, and then later to Ntirety’s fully-managed Microsoft Office 365. During this process, Ntirety assisted State Industrial in maintaining their email server and standardizing their applications across the board, creating a more efficient, streamlined infrastructure.

Challenges

Uptime 
State Industrial was struggling with reliability and downtime due to the number of applications they were hosting internally. With 800+ users and only a three-person staff to manage it all, these issues were a strain on company resources.

Staffing Costs
Without an on-staff Exchange administrator, troubleshooting and repairs had to be outsourced, which was becoming increasingly costly. Plus, hosting internal servers was becoming more difficult for the company’s small IT team, and the high electrical, cooling, and maintenance costs were taking their toll.

Backup
State Industrial’s mail system required roughly 800GBs of backup, which was double the amount of space needed just three years prior. This put a strain on the company’s limited physical storage infrastructure and small IT team.

Bandwidth
Before their first migration, State Industrial’s email SPAM filtering was administered in-house. With 25-50% of the company’s traffic being created by SPAM, this had a huge impact on bandwidth.   

Standardization
State Industrial had only a small IT team managing an infrastructure where multiple applications were being used by 800+ employees. This meant far too many different kinds of apps were in use across the company, creating a need to simplify and standardize them into one suite for all to use. 

Solution

“We weren’t just trying to find someone to host our mail. We were trying to identify a trusted partner that we could work with hand-in-hand to meet our back-office IT needs.” Jeff Black, State Industrial Project Manager and Infrastructure Support Specialist

Streamline, increase performance, and add value
Ntirety strategically planned and performed a streamlined, multi-phase migration from on-premise servers to the cloud, while ensuring that the migration didn’t include unnecessary “junk” data or affect any of State Industrial’s 800+ users—or their customers. During each phase of the migration, State Industrial maintained uptime during business hours while Ntirety provided support during and after hours.

Results

Making the transition to the new and improved Ntirety managed infrastructure enabled State Industrial to achieve:

More Reliability and Uptime
Ntirety helped State Industrial migrate their email servers from an on-premises environment and internally-run data center to a Ntirety-managed email environment that is constantly monitored, and fully supported by Ntirety experts.

Lower Costs
With Ntirety’s help, State Industrial eliminated the need for on-premise servers and the associated physical infrastructure. This led to a significant savings in upfront CAPEX costs.

Better Backups
State Industrial is now able to bounce back at any time because of regular Ntirety backups.

Increased Productivity
With Office 365, State Industrial’s 800 employees now utilize an integrated set of tools to communicate, share files, sync calendars, and more. There is now less software for the three-person IT team to track, control and troubleshoot. This helps keep support costs down and allows State Industrial to more on development efforts on a smaller group of platforms, thereby increasing overall productivity.

More Control
After the transition to Office 365, State Industrial regained control of several management tasks, giving them more flexibility and control to be nimble and act fast.

Increased Customization
By using Office 365 within a dedicated State Industrial-only environment, State Industrial can achieve more customization, as well as upgrade their mailbox capacity by 2x from 25 GB to 50 GB.