The Risk of On-Premises Solutions for Businesses with Small IT Teams

If you rely on a small team to manage and support on-premises IT solutions, you’re facing a double-edged sword. All it takes is for one or two key people to leave the company or a mission-critical application server to go down to bring business to a halt.

A painful real-life example of this is a city library system with 25 locations and about 150 back-office users who rely on the Microsoft Office suite to do their jobs. All their business applications were running on-premises solutions, and everything was fine—until the day their long-term IT manager suddenly left for another job.

Email Crash Goes Unresolved

The person who left had all the historical knowledge of passwords, system set-up, and system maintenance inside his head or saved to files the library staff could no longer access. Within a month, the library started to experience IT issues and failures across the entire organization.

One particularly troublesome problem was the Exchange environment. It crashed, and no one could send or receive emails—the library’s primary public-facing presence was severed. They could not communicate as easily with people looking to borrow books and use resource materials.

Needing email and other systems up and running ASAP, the library staff attempted to resolve the issues on their own. But with minimum technical training, that approach proved fruitless.

Lack of Log-In Information Hampers Microsoft Assistance

The library then contacted Microsoft for assistance, but without a technical support contract, things did not progress. During the initial call, the library discovered it actually owned a Microsoft 365 instance in the cloud. This would have given them access to all the email and Office features they needed. But the IT manager that left did not share the login information or how to access the system.

After IT systems were down for 20 days, waiting on the support case with Microsoft to move forward, the library researched potential IT partners and contacted Velosio. We responded right away given the level of urgency.

Velosio Restores Microsoft Services in Three Hours

The team at Velosio activated the Microsoft 365 instance as the fastest way to get users online quickly. Even though the login information was not available, engineers worked with Microsoft to set up the licensing and to route email to a new tenant. This got the library staff back online within three hours.

Once library operations returned to normal, Velosio then worked with the customer to set up a managed services contract to identify other areas that may be susceptible. The client is assessing other IT services they can move to the Azure cloud and which current applications can be retired.

The long-term approach is to enable the library to remove the single point of failure for the library’s IT systems—a lone IT resource with everything inside their head. The move to the cloud protects the IT systems from crashing servers and local disasters, such as power outages. The move also enables the ongoing technology refreshes for software and hardware that occur automatically under the cloud license subscription model.

Managed Services and the Cloud Offer Double Layer Protection

As this library case study illustrates, on-premises solutions managed by one or two people come with many IT risks. It’s important to consider your system vulnerabilities and proactively mitigate the situation before an unplanned event happens to your organization.

To learn more about how to solve this challenge, check out Velosio Microsoft 365 Managed Services. More than 4,000 businesses have benefited by partnering with our dedicated team of experts who provide user, licensing, and system administration support, with knowledge of the entire Office suite of productivity tools—from Outlook email to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams.