The Background
PAC Outsourcing is a professional campaign law compliance services firm based in Alexandria, VA. The firm offers political fund management and election law counseling to the political action committees of corporations, trade and professional associations and labor organizations.
The Challenge
PAC Outsourcing had done some outsourcing of its own, having contracted with an IT services firm for technical support. PAC Outsourcing’s email system desperately needed to be updated. The system was very antiquated – using an iMap and POP protocol – preventing users from syncing between devices or sharing contacts and calendars. COO Karen Linebarger was also concerned about security. “We have a lot of very sensitive data, and security is very important to us,” she said.
Unfortunately, the vendor was not meeting expectations, and it was becoming increasingly clear to Compliance Director Camille Jones that a change was needed.
The Solution
Jones knew that Microsoft Office 365 had all the capabilities the firm needed but did not trust her current vendor to take her firm where it needed to go. Jones and Linebarger selected Nortec for the cloud migration and to address their security concerns. “We wanted to access files from anywhere securely, have a better archiving system and firewall – and we wanted to get all of these things taken care of with Nortec,” said Jones.
Nortec set up several strategy and planning calls with Jones and Linebarger, using those to create a transition plan so that the team would be comfortable with the move to the cloud. Using the cloud adoption framework, Nortec planned to migrate SQL servers from their on-premise environment to the cloud, ensuring they had procured adequate data to accommodate the company’s capacity and stability requirements. “We had to migrate many, many gigabytes of data to the cloud,” Jones said. “Throughout the whole process, we knew what to expect, what day it would start, what day other things would happen. It all went according to plan.”
After the migration, Nortec returned to fine-tune and configure the Azure environment, setting up cloud governance policies to reduce the organization’s risks and enforce adherence to corporate use policies. Nortec also set up security and identity baselines to ensure PAC Outsourcing could consistently apply security policies to the entire technology environment, giving them additional protection for their sensitive data. “The transition was great, Nortec was fantastic and any issues we had were resolved within hours,” said Linebarger.
The Benefits
PAC Outsourcing is now utilizing MS Office 365 for email, as well as Teams, and is currently reviewing policies in order to use OneDrive and SharePoint in terms of moving files to the cloud. Nortec also configured Azure Active Directory and desktop management tool Microsoft InTune, ensuring the company’s technology and data are in alignment with best practices. “We now have a robust firewall, VPN access and a backup routine. All set up by Nortec – all correctly,” said Jones.
The firm has also been able to achieve some cost savings as a result of the switch to MS Office 365. “Now that we’re using Teams, we don’t need to use WebEx anymore. Teams has all the capabilities we need,” said Jones.
Beyond cost savings, the firm has been enjoying new efficiencies, thanks to the centralization afforded by Azure. “The response time from Nortec has been great,” Jones continued. “I’m no longer a middleman to getting a problem fixed, so it frees me up to do other things.”
