International Literacy Association Effectively Protects Organization from Technology Obsolescence with Cloud-Based Solution
Client Overview
The International Literacy Association (ILA) is a global advocacy and membership organization of more than 300,000 literacy educators, researchers, and experts across 75 countries. With over 60 years of experience, ILA has set the standard for how literacy is defined, taught and evaluated.
With 65 employees situated in Newark, Delaware, around the country and beyond, the ILA works to empower educators, inspire students, and encourage leaders with the resources needed to make literacy accessible for all.
Challenges They Overcame
Over the course of 4 years, ILA worked with ARG to conquer a number of challenges:
- The nonprofit was planning to move to a telework environment and needed more flexibility than what was provided by their aging on-premises phone system.
- ILA’s long-term Managed Service Provider (MSP) had been housing ILA’s infrastructure in their data center. The MSP suddenly went out of business, leaving ILA with one day to find a new home for their infrastructure.
- The organization was scheduled to move into a new office location. ILA needed to ensure that they had the proper technology implemented and resources available to mitigate the risks associated with moving their mission-critical data along with their physical office location.
How They Did It
ILA leveraged ARG’s industry knowledge and expertise as they worked to identify requirements and explore potential solutions for the nonprofit’s plethora of issues. The team addressed the limitations associated with the legacy phone system first. ARG determined that a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) offering was an ideal match. Replacing their existing on-site phone system with a cloud-based system provided remote employees with a significantly better user experience and saved the organization tens of thousands of dollars that would have typically been spent on mobile devices for remote workers.
Left in the lurch by their MSP, ARG helped ILA find an interim company who offered their services for a few months to stabilize them. This temporary solution provided ILA with more time to evaluate their options and make a better long-term strategic decision.
ARG was able to bring ILA a recommendation that would allow the client to completely transition their infrastructure to the cloud and under one provider. The migration included Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Desktop as a Service (DaaS), and georedundant Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to ensure continuity of service going forward.
Soon after the migration was complete, the client seamlessly moved physical office locations. Since their infrastructure was already off-site and their employees were fully trained and acclimated to accessing data remotely, there was no impact to business productivity during the move.
Results
Transitioning their phone system and infrastructure to the cloud eliminated the physical office from being a point of failure. This transition allowed ILA to have a seamless, downtime-free move and now enables most of ILA’s workforce to work remotely over 50% of the time. When asked at a recent event what they would have done differently throughout this process, Nick Girotti, ILA’s Network Operations Specialist replied:
We would have moved to the cloud much earlier.
The additional benefits to moving to the cloud were consistent scalable monthly spend, elimination of CapEx equipment purchases, and availability and ease of access to additional security services such as antivirus, malware protection, and intrusion detection. In conclusion, by gaining access to a portfolio of evolving cloud solutions, the ILA team effectively protected their organization from technology obsoletion.
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