MakeWay is a national charity that connects and empowers a wide range of people and initiatives across the country to take on tough social and environmental challenges, building a stronger Canada. Day-to-day IT support and maintenance activities consumed much of MakeWay’s in house IT resources who needed help to monitor and manage their IT systems.

CHALLENGE

With only 2-3 IT personnel to support their three offices and 160 employees spread across Canada, MakeWay needed technical support to ensure steady service during peak periods of the workday coast to coast. They also needed a cloud-strategy and support in helping them rid their infrastructure and reduce their IT operational burden as well as help to streamline their siloed IT processes and platforms.

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SOLUTION

MakeWay turned to Softlanding to consolidate and move their IT environment to the cloud while also helping them manage day-to-day support and sustainment activities that usually consumed much of their in-house IT resources.

Softlanding’s Managed IT Services have improved MakeWay’s ability to operate its three locations in an “always available” manner and, Softlanding’s after-hours support helps MakeWay keep its operations running at all times.

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RESULTS

Save +$50k in support services

With almost 90% of Tide’s previous issues stemming from their terminal servers, Outlook, and their old instance of SharePoint, moving to Softlanding’s managed services has helped MakeWay improve efficiency and reduce their reliance on ad-hoc technical support.

Maximize their Office 365 investment

Initially investing in Office 365 to offer their staff the ability to work from home, MakeWay has made use of the full suite of products including PowerBI for advanced analytics, and Skype for Business – to replace their legacy telephone system, saving them $108k/year.

Reduced Physical Server Expenses to $4.5k/year

By moving to the cloud, MakeWay has reduced their physical server expenses from $50k to $4.5k/year. Additionally, the reduction in space has reduced MakeWay’s rent expense which was originally reserved as a space for their servers and VMs.

Time to Focus on Strategic Priorities

Having Softlanding’s transferable reactive support hours bucket gives MakeWay  more time to improve their IT technologies and allocate projects to keep pace with organizational goals and demands.

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