How Children of America (COA) Optimized IT Operations for Resilience
Read this case study to see how COA found a better cloud and disaster recovery solution for their systems and data.
“TierPoint engineers in provisioning were just fantastic. The whole migration went over without a hitch”
Gary Fiorito
VP of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
Introduction
Children of America (COA) is an educational childcare provider that manages 60 locations across the country. The organization has 1,600 employees, including teachers and directors. While COA relies on an MSP for day-to-day ticketing issues, they only have one internal IT employee – Gary Fiorito, the VP of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer. To maintain licensing, continue high-quality care for the children in these centers, and facilitate smooth systems for teachers, administrators, and families, COA needs to ensure they have solid infrastructure and can handle many moving parts.
Challenges
There are many systems COA relies on daily to meet expectations for all end-users, including staff, parents, and children. Teachers at COA use iPads that contain daily sheets about the children they’ll be working with. Directors and other staff members use computers for reporting, maintaining schedules, and basic operational tasks. Parents use a portal to look up information on their accounts, check billing, and receive messages from COA. They also have access to cameras where they can check on what their children are doing from any device. All of these functions require reliable uptime.
With a headquarters in Delray Beach, Florida, COA was worried about what would happen if a hurricane hit the data center and ground operations to a halt. At the time, they had fiber connection running directly to a server rack which connected to their corporate office.
Fiorito was maintaining and configuring SQL servers, web servers, file servers, and active domain controllers at this Florida data center. In addition to worrying about natural disasters, Fiorito wanted to reduce the amount of necessary hardware and firmware updates. He was seeking a partner that could maintain things and streamline processes, raise their level of business continuity, minimize the potential of downtime, and serve as experts on hand who could help with any issues that arise.
Solution
COA came to TierPoint around 2018 to start the migration process, which ultimately resulted in TierPoint assisting with infrastructure and housing workloads at the Nashville data center. While migration can be a stressful process, the due diligence, hour-by-hour planning, and preparatory steps allowed COA to make the change seamlessly.
“TierPoint engineers in provisioning were just fantastic. The whole migration went over without a hitch,” said Fiorito. In the process, COA was also able to get rid of some servers and scale down to what they truly needed. COA and TierPoint picked a weekend to “flip the switch,” got everything live on a Saturday, and on Monday, nobody noticed that anything had changed.
The initial project at the Nashville location included multitenant cloud, storage, and OS management. COA also used TierPoint for a disaster recovery (DR) location in Dallas, a geographically diverse area to provide additional safeguards against natural disasters.
Prior to this, the organization was using a daily backup system that replicated servers in Nashville on a physical box, called Quorum. However, they wanted to have an additional location for redundancy, in case something were to happen in Nashville. Similarly to the initial migration to Nashville, TierPoint’s team handled the DR migration to Dallas. All Fiorito had to do was ensure the networks talked to each other and set up IPsec tunnels between the firewalls.
TierPoint also manages the Microsoft 365 tenant for COA. If the organization needs help with Active Directory or Azure syncing, TierPoint has been able to push that out for the team. Soon, COA will be working with TierPoint to connect a virtual Microsoft application server to the environment to offload media services for the surveillance cameras to a server.
Results
The biggest things that have changed for COA since partnering with TierPoint have included the reassurance that servers are maintained that there’s a second set of eyes monitoring everything, and that TierPoint will keep COA informed and will work to mitigate any issues that arise. “Having that peace of mind has helped keep me going,” said Fiorito.
When asked to choose features that make TierPoint stand out, Fiorito mentioned responsiveness, expertise, and the ability to tackle complex issues. In the future, COA may upgrade their fiber connection and implement more Azure services, knowing that TierPoint will serve as a good resource to get things updated and transitioned over. With TierPoint’s help, COA can increase CPU and RAM on the fly and expand servers as needed, providing much-needed resilience and flexibility for their growing operations.
If you’re looking for a partner who can safeguard your critical systems, reduce your maintenance workload, and provide much-needed risk mitigation, learn more about our services and reach out to a member of our team today.
At A Glance
Industry
Educational Childcare
Technology
Multitenant cloud, storage, OS management, DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service)
Challenges
With workloads housed near their headquarters in Delray Beach, Florida, COA wanted to migrate to a location that would be less prone to natural disasters. The organization also wanted to streamline operations, reduce their hardware maintenance and upgrade requirements, and work with an expert partner who could facilitate current needs, as well as future growth.
Solution
COA started working with TierPoint in 2018, beginning with multitenant cloud, storage, and OS management at the Nashville data center, and later expanded to a DR location in Dallas.
Results
Having the peace of mind that TierPoint can manage workloads, mitigate risks, and facilitate migrations has allowed COA’s one-person IT team to focus on other projects and keep moving forward.
Keep Exploring
Visit our knowledge center to explore expert insights and thought leadership to power your digital breakaway.