11:11 Systems

Leica Geosystems, a company with a 200-year history, faced a significant challenge when it launched its SmartNet business in 2010. The company had to transition from a traditional sales business model to a subscription business model, which was a radical shift. The new business model required a network of GPS receivers throughout North America, with data from these receivers being streamed back to central servers and accessed by users in real time on a subscription basis. This presented numerous challenges, including the need to scale quickly and easily, limited in-house VMware knowledge, and the need for equipment that was available 24x7. The company also faced challenges with expansion, as every time they needed to purchase additional servers or software, they had to put in a fixed asset request which slowed the process down.

SteelDome Cyber, a global data protection and storage company, was struggling with unpredictable cloud costs and pricing models. The company's cybersecurity solutions are designed to leverage the security and flexibility of the public cloud. However, to guarantee fair and predictable pricing to its customers, SteelDome needed the same guarantee from its own cloud service provider. Before partnering with 11:11 Systems for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and object storage, SteelDome tried its hand with a few of the large hyperscalers. What they found were cost-related guessing games and rampant uncertainty.

Tree Top, a global business with over 1,000 growers, engineers, and food scientists, was facing several challenges. The company's primary infrastructure was still being backed up on premises via physical disk, which was not in line with industry best practices. They lacked offsite backup and disaster recovery, and their aging infrastructure was in need of a refresh. They also needed secure and reliable access to data, and were concerned about the potential costs of unplanned downtime. To address these issues, they needed to replace much of their existing legacy infrastructure.

Cochrane & Company, an insurance underwriting services provider, was facing challenges with its aging on-premises hardware. The company needed a flexible and scalable solution that could provide secure and reliable access to data. The increasing threats of cybersecurity were also a concern. The company's existing virtualized environment was not compatible with cloud solutions like Azure or AWS, and the in-house team lacked the expertise to make it work. The company's data center infrastructure was also becoming too large for one person to handle.

Allegany Insurance Group was facing several challenges with its existing disaster recovery strategy. The company was operating a secondary data center with redundant hardware purely for disaster recovery purposes. This approach was putting undue strain on Allegany’s small IT team and consuming valuable resources. Moreover, the company's two offices were located only a couple hours apart, meaning, if an outage or disaster were to occur that impacted both regions, the company would be unable to failover and stay online. The company was also reliant on a single internet service provider for connectivity, which was not ideal.

Lush, a British cosmetics retailer, was facing a challenge with its backup needs. The company was growing rapidly, and its data was expanding at the same pace. The existing backup solution was becoming increasingly costly to maintain and required the use of different third-party technologies. The goal was to lower costs and standardize around Veeam, which Lush was already using on premises. The company needed a solution that was cost-effective, flexible, scalable, and easy to implement. They also wanted to ensure secure and reliable access to their data.

Amsterdam Ambulance was facing challenges with its aging infrastructure and technical issues due to outdated equipment. The company had security concerns with multiple recovery locations and was in need of an easy cloud implementation solution. Their Disaster Recovery (DR) infrastructure was getting old and it was time to replace the environment. DRaaS seemed like the perfect solution to eliminate the cost, ongoing maintenance and cumbersome RFP process for their infrastructure.

The Orlando Economic Partnership, a public-private, not-for-profit economic and community development organization, was facing challenges with data security and redundancy. The organization was experiencing data growth, which is common for most companies. However, with data growing, the need for the elimination of data redundancy became critical. IT budgets are traditionally not growing; therefore, cloud has become an important option to help control spiraling infrastructure costs due to increased amounts of data needed for everyday usage and long-term compliance needs. The data includes file data, onsite CRM, applications, and Office 365 backups. The organization also had to consider the unpredictable weather in Florida that can affect businesses, residents, and visitors. As climate change worsens, it’s fueling more frequent natural disasters that will only add to the problem. Orlando Economic Partnership had to consider this when deciding on how best to backup all of their data and applications.

Lloyd Group, a technology services firm, was facing several challenges. They were analyzing costs with private cloud refresh and needed a flexible and scalable infrastructure. They also wanted to reduce infrastructure tasks with cost reduction. Disaster recovery was critical for their business and they wanted to provide a stable and reputable solution. There was a lot of turnover in the private cloud solution area and they realized that it was the right time to look for the best partner in this area. Compliance and disaster recovery were needed for a large financial services customer set which also pushed them to look for a DRaaS solution.

The Municipal Gas Authority of Georgia was facing challenges with their outdated tape backup system. The system was not only burdensome but also cost-prohibitive as the data grew. The tapes were stored at an off-site location, which meant that the data was sometimes sitting there for weeks at a time. The tape backup system also had limited space, which meant that the team had to continually purchase additional tapes as their data grew. The team realized that they needed to be more proactive with their backups and started looking at several cloud backup vendors.

NordOps, a Managed Service Provider (MSP) for wholesale distributors running Epicor’s Eclipse ERP software platform, faced several challenges. They had a ready customer base with a clear need for enterprise-class IT services like Infrastructure, Disaster Recovery, and Backup. However, they lacked the resources, both in terms of time and money, to build their own solutions. Additionally, they lacked name recognition and expertise in the Disaster Recovery (DR) space. Many of their customers, despite being large in terms of revenue, had limited IT understanding and therefore limited resources for their IT budget. The rise of ransomware and cybercrime prompted many companies using the ERP software to seek solutions like real-time Disaster Recovery or more reliable backups.

Rufus Leonard, a leading UK independent agency with 29 years’ experience in brand and digital, was facing challenges with their existing disaster recovery (DR) solution. The solution, which had grown into a fully managed DR solution, was proving to be unreliable and complex. The variables for DR testing were changing every time, leading to a lack of confidence in its effectiveness in a real-life DR situation. Additionally, the costs of the fully managed solution were continually growing, diminishing the return on investment. These increasing costs, combined with decreasing confidence, prompted the search for a new DR solution to protect the 27 virtual machines in their on-premises London environment.

R’Club, a child care and social service program, was facing challenges with their existing disaster recovery solution. They were using a local partner to lease space for replication with a nearby data center and an off-the-shelf NAS device to copy their backups off-site. However, the process was cumbersome and error-prone, with the device repeatedly failing and requiring rebooting. Moreover, the off-site backups didn't provide the assurance of ongoing availability that R’Club required. It would take hours or days to recover a system, which was time they couldn't afford, especially during hurricane season in Florida when they are responsible for the children of first responders. Lastly, replacing the NAS device with a more functional alternative proved to be cost prohibitive for the nonprofit organization.

Chambliss, a long-standing legal firm, was in need of a reliable, low maintenance backup solution for their small IT team. They also required cost-effective cloud services. The firm had tried offsite backups with different local companies, but while the results were acceptable, the cost was not. It was clear to the team that the solution in place wasn’t robust enough for their workloads. They needed a solution that would support their lean IT team and tenacious attorneys, reflecting their commitment to providing the best services to their clients.

Synergy Logistics, a software house specializing in warehouse management technologies and solutions, recognized the increasing importance of e-commerce and the subsequent rise in the number of daily transactions. They needed a cloud provider who could help them exceed their customers’ requirements in a rapidly evolving industry. The company sought a cost-effective SaaS solution that could support highly transactional businesses while maintaining on-premise levels of security and availability. The new logistics demands of next- or same-day delivery required a cloud infrastructure that provided the agility and flexibility needed to manage these demands.

Khatib & Alami Offshore (K&A), a global engineering design firm, was facing challenges due to its rapid growth. The company needed a robust infrastructure that could ensure efficiency and protect the workloads associated with its clients’ multi-billion dollar projects. The company's technology journey has taken it from disparate IT islands to private cloud and, finally, to public cloud, which has delivered the most cost-effective, agile means to ensure rapid scalability and facilitate growth plans. The company manages complex, high dollar projects with aggressive deadlines, making it vital for K&A to ensure its mission critical systems, such as email and project management, are available and meeting performance and SLA targets.

Piab, a leader in industrial automation, was facing challenges with its production servers and disaster recovery. The company had been using its own servers at a colocation data center in Stockholm, but any time a hard drive failed or the IT team needed to add RAM or storage, a staff member had to physically drive to the location more than 30 minutes away. Then they had to deal with security procedures and equipment delivery in and out of the data center. Faced with the prospect of purchasing all new hardware infrastructure, Anderson took a more strategic step and tapped [11:11]’s enterprise cloud to host its entire production environment. Piab had been using an incumbent software solution for disaster recovery, but it no longer met the IT team’s requirements and did not inspire confidence. For one thing, it required a lot of resources—several gigabytes per server—from the environment. The bigger concern was that Anderson and his team weren’t sure that it would meet their recovery time objectives, and they weren’t easily able to run tests to see how it would perform in a real disaster.

Mengali Accountancy, a financial services firm specializing in real estate syndication and fund management, faced the challenge of securely moving, storing, and managing large amounts of sensitive financial data. The firm had gone completely digital in 2007, which led to a significant increase in data storage needs. The firm also had to efficiently retrieve documents and provide them to third parties, including other CPA firms, the IRS, and other government agencies. The firm's previous backup solution consisted of onsite and offsite backups, with the offsite backup located only about ten miles away. This proximity posed a risk in the event of a local natural disaster.

FolderWave, a private company based near Boston, is one of the earliest cloud-space providers for Higher Education. Businesses that serve the Higher Education enrollment management industry must be able to manage large volumes of personal data and information, prioritizing security – all in an environment where transaction volumes are highly cyclical and date sensitive. Success is further determined by an organization’s ability to deliver solutions that can be tailored to the specific needs of each institution it serves. There is tremendous variability in the process of enrollment management from one school to another. Today, FolderWave helps flagship colleges and universities like Boston College, Carnegie Mellon, Northeastern, Merrimack College, Wittenberg, Tulane, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute centralize millions of documents representing a soup-to-nuts approach to admission applications, financial aid forms, academic transcripts, contracts and grants, and practically any other paperless documentation each school wants to track.

Procon, a North American mining contractor, was dealing with an aging ERP system that was no longer able to keep up with the demands of the business. The company had a large fleet of equipment to track and a workforce scattered across some of the most remote and inhospitable regions on the planet. With new ownership potentially pushing workload volumes and availability demands even higher, it was clear that it was time for a change. The company needed tighter cost control over projects and a more robust and reliable system to handle their operations.

P3 Health Partners, a health population management group, was facing several challenges. They needed a multi-layer security system to protect their health information and systems. They also had massive volumes of data to store and back up. With a small workforce, they needed supplemental support. The data-intensive processes involved in population health management also called for a high level of IT performance, as well as a solution with the capacity to back up nearly eight terabytes of data, representing 11 years of health records. With employees and customers relying on P3 data, having a highly available, fully recoverable environment was an imperative. And, for a company only two years old with a small IT staff, keeping costs down was important.

Norwegian Cruise Line, a leading innovator in cruise travel, needed to ensure the resiliency of its systems and technology to provide exceptional service to guests. The company's reservation system had become more complex due to growth and expanding demands, and they needed a provider with the expertise to run their mission-critical operations. This included managing the NCL.com website, which serves prospective guests, travel agents, and cruise ship officials. The company sought to ensure that disasters, from natural to technical problems, security issues, and other operational snafus, wouldn't disrupt its core reservation system for its fleet of cruise ships.

Jonas Fitness, a division of Jonas Software, faced a one-year deadline to migrate its club management applications from legacy platforms to a robust, scalable, and secure alternative. The applications – a legacy system known as i4™, and a next-generation SaaS platform known as Compete®– would require not only highly available production hosting services, but disaster recovery and PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance support as well. Historically, the organization had struggled to manage and enhance its systems in an agile fashion. Rigid and slowmoving change controls hampered the success of its Compete application. As a software company in a fast-paced industry, Jonas Fitness was eager to obtain superior IT management. Given the tight timetable for migration, the complexity of the endeavor, and the array of skills necessary to manage its platforms, the firm quickly decided it would need to engage a managed services partner.

Inspired Entertainment, a leading provider of online gaming solutions, was planning its entry into the Canadian market. The company needed an established service provider with in-country data centers and proven disaster recovery capabilities. The company traditionally relied on its own IT infrastructure as the platform for service delivery. However, entering a new market posed risks and costs. Inspired’s Director of IT Operations, James Wilson, led a review of potential service providers that could meet the requirements of the regulators, as well as Inspired’s own criteria for technical capabilities and pricing.