The Background
Atlantic Financial, Inc. has been a leader in residential and investment property financing since 1993. By offering in-house underwriting, the company is able to provide mortgages and home improvement finance for their clients. Atlantic Financial, Inc. loan options include Conventional loans, Jumbo loans, Refinances, FHA/VA loans, Reverse mortgages and Unsecured Home Improvement Finance.
The Challenge
Atlantic Financial was unhappy with the cost and value of their current system. The firm’s Citrix environment was increasingly unreliable and becoming very costly to troubleshoot and maintain. This situation was limiting for the future of Atlantic’s growing business. Atlantic Financial needed its IT systems to improve their workflow, not impede it.
Julie Isaac, Business Administrator for Atlantic Financial, had some top priorities in mind. “We wanted to provide high quality resources & reliable connectivity to all staff who worked in our office, and access company resources to staff that worked remotely. Our system was not meeting our standards in terms of reliability or efficiency. It was critical for our productivity to have a dependable and cost-effective system,” said Isaac. “In addition, we wanted to make our disaster recovery system even more robust.
The Solution
Isaac knew the requirements and goals were ambitious, especially due to a tight deadline .
Isaac chose Nortec for the migration, based on her previous experience with Nortec, as well as its competitive pricing and breadth of capabilities and services. “I knew Nortec could absolutely do what we needed, and their pricing ended up being more competitive than other firms, “ said Isaac.
Floyd Hardy and Paul Wismar, engineers with Nortec, created a project plan and timeline based on Isaac’s needs and tight deadline. Nortec immediately set up Atlantic Financial on Azure servers, and Office 365 services. Then Nortec began document and email migration, cloud infrastructure and application deployment, as well as mobile device management.
“The Azure servers, which are Microsoft’s solution for small businesses, are so much more economical for us,” says Isaac. “We now have true remote connectivity, with all email and files integrated with Office 365 and SharePoint.”
Atlantic moved all of their servers, line of business applications and data to Microsoft’s cloud-based suite of products. “The move illustrates an exciting new option for businesses ready to embrace a shift in their IT operating model”, says Wismar. “We can deliver across the full IT spectrum.”
“Within a very short timeframe, Atlantic’s entire infrastructure -down to their cell phones – is integrated for maximum productivity,” says Hardy. “They can access anything, anywhere, at any time.”
The Benefits
Office 365, including SharePoint Online, allows Atlantic Financial’s workforce to access files from any internet connected device and get work done easily from a variety of locations. “Nortec understood our need for reliable, stable data storage, so far the transition has been very smooth – even the training on Sharepoint, which was new for us,” Isaac explained.
In addition, Atlantic Financial was happier with the larger backbone provided by Microsoft and features for the mobile staff, and now has the peace of mind that comes with knowing that its workforce can login and access files reliably and securely.
“Data is our lifeline. We consider any data loss a disaster for our organization. So we now have cloud servers with cloud backup, and replication of our data to a local barracuda device and to east and west coast secure data centers.” said Isaac.
“When time is critical, as it is in the mortgage industry, technology should advance with you, not hinder you,” said Isaac. “And we thank Nortec for enabling the next era of Atlantic Financial technologies!”
