Project Summary and Client Background
RealJoy is a vacation rental company with locations in Fort Walton Beach, Destin, and Panama City Beach, Florida. They provide rental properties all along the Gulf of Mexico from Okaloosa Island to Cape San Blas, Florida. From affordable family spaces and beach front condominiums to luxury homes, and townhomes. RealJoy can meet the need of any vacationer desiring to enjoy the Emerald Coast.
RealJoy needed an Office 365 IT solution to keep their CFO and COO from spending their time working on IT problems for the company. Bit-Wizards implemented a full-service managed IT solution to perfectly fit their needs and alleviate stress from constant IT problems.
The Challenge
The CFO and COO of RealJoy Vacations were spending hours upon hours of their valuable time fielding IT
questions and fixing IT problems for their company. They were already using Office 365 but did not know how to manage it to maintain smooth IT operations. Also at this time, they were using a service called Box.net for cloud storage. This product was a high cost at $9,000 per year. They were unaware that as a current Office 365 subscriber they could use SharePoint online instead for all of their cloud storage at no extra cost to the business. The tourism industry in the Panhandle of Florida experiences the peak of their "season" between the Memorial Day and Labor Day holidays each year. During this time, many companies ramp up their hiring to support the increase in business.
RealJoy is no different. During this season, they onboard numerous new employees and the IT side of this process needed significant improvement. Another immediate issue for RealJoy was insufficient WiFi coverage at their warehouse.
The Solution
Business Solution
To begin the managed IT service for RealJoy, Bit-Wizards took over the management of their Office 365 account and employed IT best practices across their organization. In conjunction with the Office 365 management, Bit-Wizards also deployed new routers and WiFi across all five of RealJoy's locations. This step instantly improved their WiFi issues.
Immediately after onboarding RealJoy into the Bit-Wizards managed IT service, the Bit-Wizards IT team began fielding all technical issues, taking the stress of IT related problems off of the shoulders of RealJoy’s CFO and COO. In subsequent months, RealJoy expanded and grew into a new office space and naturally, Bit-Wizards rewired the space for optimal IT infrastructure.
Another positive impact from RealJoy’s new relationship with Bit-Wizards was the realization that they no longer needed to pay for cloud storage through Box.net. Bit-Wizards helped RealJoy move their data from Box.net to SharePoint online, which they already owned as part of their subscription to Office 365.
Technical Solution
First, Bit-Wizards configured and branded SharePoint for RealJoy and then, to make this move seamless, Bit-Wizards build a permission matrix based on how RealJoy was using Box.net. The when the migration to SharePoint began, all the necessary file/folder structure, as well as role-based permissions for both internal and external users, was already in place and ready for users to access.
To perform the initial migration of data, Bit-Wizards set up a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure, which allowed them to take advantage of the extensive bandwidth available when using the cloud, they then connected this Azure virtual machine to Box.net on one end and Microsoft SharePoint on the other. To complete the migration Bit-Wizards then blocked user access to Box.net and redirected them to SharePoint where they could easily find their files based on the original file structure.
Bit-Wizards is amazing! They have saved my company thousands of dollars and hours upon hours of headaches by managing our IT. Everyone is more confident at work knowing we can depend on them to fix things quickly when things go wrong.
-Micah Berg, CEO & Founder, RealJoy Vacations
Bit-Wizards maintains RealJoy IT with continued monitoring and security, but in addition to their regular IT needs, BW also meets with RealJoy on a quarterly basis to review their IT goals and make sure they stay up-to-date with technology and industry trends.
The Result
Before hiring BW IT, RealJoy Vacations considered hiring a full-time internal IT employee. However, they chose to use Bit-Wizards Managed IT service, and due to that decision, they have saved $22,000 in IT salary costs just in their first year of service alone. Companies like RealJoy benefit from the combined expertise of the entire Bit-Wizards IT team who have strengths and depth of knowledge across multiple IT disciplines. Hiring an internal IT person usually does not provide this kind of value, and it will ultimately cost a business more money in the long-run.
This savings in salary expense is not the only benefit RealJoy has experienced. Bit-Wizards has saved RealJoy’s CFO and COO countless hours of IT troubleshooting as well. They can now focus on business development and other issues significant to their company instead of IT problems. Click here to learn more about how we can help.