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Powell Insurance Agency
Network and Infrastructure Support
• Scope: To provide such I.T. services as required to support the organization's business goals.
• Status: Still providing I.T. services.
• Commentary: In the summer of 2002, Powell Insurance called on Interactive for emergency network support: one of their primary servers had stopped working and after two days of down time, the MIS director was frantic. Interactive personnel worked around the clock throughout the night until the system was fully functional.
At the request of the Powell Insurance Agency's owner, Interactive performed a full system audit and discovered that the existing network was poorly planned and rife with functional and operational problems. These problems included unnecessary downtime over the previous two year period; non-functioning hardware and software; regular loss of data requiring frequent restores from backups or reentry of data from hardcopy; significant virus infection of OS and application software; and a demoralized and frantic crew of users and management.
Over the next few months, Interactive trimmed the number of required servers in half; installed more efficient network security hardware including a state of the art firewall; set up a usable backup system; restored remote access; eliminated all dial up, ISDN, and DSL connections; installed and configured a hands-off network virus protection package; and removed viruses from over 50 workstations and servers.
With the exception of scheduled maintenance, their network systems have been running non-stop since. Powell Insurance Agency has drastically lowered its IT expenditures while showing a major decrease in down-time, huge increases in productivity and many more happy faces at the weekly department meetings.
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