Imagine your office is in a rural part of the country, and your base of operations covers over 16,000 miles. It can be challenging to find the workforce that you need. When you’re in the position to look for talent in a competitive field like IT – the struggle is even greater.

That’s the situation a prospective client found themselves in earlier this year. Their network administrator was leaving to pursue another opportunity, and their sole help desk technician wasn’t equipped to take over all the added responsibility and knowledge transfer. The client attempted to replace their network administrator, but their search kept coming up short. That’s when they reached out to Springthrough. By the time we connected with them, they were in dire need of solving their problem ASAP.

We visited their office and surveyed their needs. We forged relationships with many of their internal staff to make sure things were moving in the right direction and on the right foot. In that process, we saw that there were many gaps to fill.

• They needed expertise with their hardware monitoring solution, so we set up a monitoring tool called PRTG (for servers, workstations, and network devices).
• To allow us to remotely access staff machines and servers in need of support, we implemented a tool called Kaseya.
• Since communication is key no matter the project, we used a tool called ConnectWise as a help desk ticketing system, which includes ticket prioritization.
• We started investigating the technology projects they had already invested time into, but hadn’t completed, like their Office 365 migration project.

Beyond these immediate action items, our client needed help with technology strategy and guidance, so Springthrough effectively because their Virtual CIO.  

A Virtual CIO isn’t the work of just one person, but several. One of our Solutions Architects sets the strategy while the rest of the Managed Services team helps to implement it. We entered into an agreement to manage our client’s help desk and the sole help desk technician, which was a new type of work for us. Typically, we come in as the help desk, but in this case, the client already had someone doing a portion of that help desk work. This person now spends time daily with our Support Services Manager, going over prioritization of time and help desk tickets, as well as escalation when he gets stuck on an issue.

The distance between our office and their main office (400 miles) was a learning experience as we initially got to know each other. We scheduled daily, weekly, and monthly remote meetings to make sure we were helping them to the best of our ability and to continue receiving insight into their day-to-day technical operation. We do travel onsite when the occasion arises, but once we won their trust, we could use our remote tools to deploy software to help manage their network and infrastructure.