A legacy IT environment, no direction, and no strategy made IT infrastructure management and reliability more difficult
| Customer: San Juan Capistrano | Profile: San Juan Capistrano, located in Orange County, California was created around its Mission and much of the Spanish culture can still be found in its shopping and housing architecture
Services: IT Consulting |
| Size: 51-200 employees | |
| Region: San Juan Capistrano, CA | |
| Industry: Government Administration |
Business Need
The City of San Juan Capistrano’s IT infrastructure had grown haphazardly without a strategic plan. As a result, they were operating on obsolete and poorly managed servers, workstations, and network infrastructure, putting the City at an unacceptable level of risk. They had no tools or processes in place to measure service levels for their internal users and their end user community. As they solved a one IT problem, it seemed to add layers of difficulty in resolving other problems.
They also wanted to make significant changes to their IT infrastructure and sought a partner that could help them not only develop a strategic IT plan, but rearchitect, and refresh their network and computing environments providing their users a better level of service and provide all of this for a fixed monthly fee.
How did Synoptek solve it?
Synoptek implemented a multi-phased IT infrastructure overhauling and consolidating multiple obsolete physical servers onto a VMware virtual infrastructure. Synoptek reduced the number of servers and established a Dell Compellent storage area network along with a new Cisco-powered network backbone. This consolidation increased service levels, and at the same time decreased the City’s IT costs.
Synoptek IT Service can take you from reacting to IT problems to being strategic and proactive
Solution and Approach
It might have been possible to solve our problems by
- Increasing IT staff and user productivity by designing and implementing a more efficient network and hardware infrastructure
- A “managed” IT environment was designed to proactively diagnose issues for remediation before they created user problems
- Secure remote access capabilities were implemented
- Better IT governance and standards were developed to reduce IT operational issues
- The risk was reduced by designing system redundancy and backups
Currently, Synoptek provides the City of San Juan Capistrano with the following services:
- IT leadership, planning, and CTO services
- IT Project planning and management
- Network infrastructure rearchitecture and upgrade
- Server virtualization and consolidation
- Systems and network engineers
- Systems and network administration
The IT Maturity Model
A IT maturity model looks at the methods and processes used according to best practices measured against defined benchmarks. The IT maturity model perspective is based on the performance of the ”entire” IT environment and how it is impacting overall business performance. The City of San Juan Capistrano found themselves in a situation similar to many other organizations. As IT devices and systems expand, layer upon layer of network circuits and hardware infrastructure are added focusing on individual projects or solving specific problems. At some point, these “solutions” add exponentially to the complexity in governing and managing users and IT systems.
Where you fall on the IT maturity model depends on the processes you use when expanding your IT infrastructure. IT devices and platforms should be added as parts of a “whole” environment and not create future problems. The goal of IT “value creation” (the far right panel below) is having an IT department that enables your company to attain its business goals. IT performance is measured by business objectives rather than IT metrics.
What is next for Synoptek and City of San Juan Capistrano
Synoptek replaced all old infrastructure components and desktop PC’s and introduced a hardware standardization program that migrated legacy hardware while maintaining specific performance levels and reliability.
Many of these steps moved to the City of San Juan Capistrano up the IT maturity model. In subsequent phases Synoptek has:
- Replaced the City’s domain controllers
- Consolidated its file servers
- Upgraded its Exchange Server
- Deployed new SQL database servers.
- Messaging platform implementation
- Productivity suite implementation
- VoIP solution implementation
- ERP review, selection, and implementation
- Business system integration points review
- Continued IT management and success