Cloud, Azure and Data Center Services Save Real Estate Developer Thousands
With vast experience across all aspects of residential and commercial real estate, Van Metre Companies has been serving the Greater Washington, D.C., area for over 65 years. Led by a leadership team focused on ensuring optimal results for investors, residents and employees, the organization is consistently awarded as a “Top Workplace” in the Metro D.C. area.
To support over 500 employees and multiple offices, Van Metre Companies maintains a robust IT team, led by IT Director Mike Saunders. Saunders and Van Metre have entrusted Nortec as the cloud consultant and expert for years.
Frequent Server Outages Can Cost A Company Productivity
Van Metre has many office locations across the Greater Washington, D.C., area – all formerly connected to their headquarters’ server. Their on-premises servers continued experiencing outages at different locations that would then cause their entire company network to go down, disrupting employee workflow and halting their ability to support their residents across the city. To get the network up and running again, their IT team was required to visit each on-site office to fix the outage. To make matters even more complex, information was stored locally at each site, preventing effective collaboration and data access across the company.
Nortec migrates on-premises SQL workloads to the cloud
After consulting with Nortec, migrating to Azure became the obvious solution for the company.
Following the Cloud Adoption Framework, Nortec’s IT experts worked with the IT team to strategize the business, financial and technical considerations. Given that the company had an enterprise agreement license with Microsoft, Nortec determined that the pay-as-you-go Azure support model would work best for Van Metre. Nortec planned the best route to migrate their workloads and planned their digital real estate and their virtual network in a way that would support all of the company’s locations, creating a central network.
With Nortec’s careful planning and organization, Van Metre experienced a smooth migration to Microsoft Azure cloud with minimal downtime for their staff. The SQL server workloads, resources, data and applications were all successfully migrated in stages over the course of several nights, ensuring minimal downtime for the company and a smooth end user experience.
Nortec’s Cloud Consultants save Van Metre Thousands
After the server migration to Azure, as Van Metre’s EA license was set to expire, they reached out to Nortec to help with the growing costs of Azure support and licensing. Nortec quickly recognized the company would save thousands by shifting their license agreement to a Nortec Cloud Solution Provider agreement, which bundled Azure support with other data service management and cloud management.
Now working with Nortec to manage the cloud, the Van Metre IT department has unparalleled access to support with their Azure cloud, cybersecurity and data management. Nortec also helped centralize security with a single firewall for all locations and enhanced user management through Active Directory, in addition to the advanced security features offered in Office 365 enterprise accounts.
Van Metre works uninterrupted on the cloud
Centralizing their servers and data through Microsoft, Azure created data and application redundancy that the company had never experienced. Where before any outage took the whole team offline, now, if a server or site fails, that workload is switched to a replicated data center and work continues unimpeded.
The IT team no longer has to run from site to site, fixing servers and restoring productivity. When there’s an issue, they’re able to correct it quickly from one location. Plus, with the support of Nortec, the company saved thousands and has enhanced security, business continuity and cloud management, ensuring that they can continue to reap the benefits of the cloud as they continue to serve the Metro D.C. area for years to come.
Set up a cloud consultation
As IT experts and a Microsoft Gold Partner, Nortec provides beneficial solutions to help companies seamlessly migrate to the cloud. Contact Nortec at 866-531-1990 to set up a cloud consultation with a certified Microsoft Gold Partner.
