Expanding (IT) with the Needs of the Community
Women Against Abuse (WAA) has been a leader in advocacy and direct services to victims of domestic violence, operating the only shelter in Philadelphia for abused women and their children. With 142 employees spread across 6 locations, WAA supports over 12,500 participants each year through emergency shelter, transitional housing, legal services, hotline counseling, behavioral healthcare, education and advocacy. WAA quickly grew their nonprofit beyond what their IT structure would handle and they had to decide whether they would develop their own IT team (and potentially distracting from the mission) or outsource their IT. They looked to KPI to help evaluate their resources.
“We are fortunate to work with KPInterface, who is basically
our outsourced IT department. They have helped us upgrade our IT network, servers, hardware, etc. and they work with an organization that helps organizations like us assess and take the steps needed to make sure they protect data up to and including HIPAA level compliance”
– Ana, Vice President Finance
Goals: Better Service for a Growing Business
- Reduce time and resources spent managing IT
- Gain confidence in their network security
- Allow technology and support to scale with WAA
Solutions: Fully Optimized and Outsourced
KPI provided an initial TAR (technology alignment review) to evaluate all of WAA’s assets– digital and physical. We provided their team with a set of solutions that they could independently take, or hire our team to implement. Ultimately, WAA decided to implement KPI’s critical recommendations right away while collaborating with KPI on a plan for additional upgrades to be implemented over a period of time. Once the critical upgrades were in place, KPI began to pro-actively support, maintain and manage the network by rolling-out the following service; Pro-active monitoring of critical network resources, pro-active maintenance of Windows updates and patch management, unlimited helpdesk ticketing, remote and on-site support, and managed security services including anti-virus, antimalware, antispam and web proxy.
Results: The Confidence and Security to Get Back to Business
In addition to creating a more stable network environment with pro-active services and on-going support as needed, KPI helped to improve the organization by implementing the following upgrades:
- A backup server at a remote site which creates a reliable data backup plan with offsite storage, multiple recovery points, hardware and physical
site redundancy. - Virtualization of their server infrastructure allowed the organization to retire end-oflife hardware and reduce management and maintenance costs.
- Seamless network integration of 2 new branches of the organization which included installing a variety of new hardware and software