Partner Spotlight: DigeTeks
Case Study
Objective: Using Messaging Architects' technology, DigiTekS provides innovative and cost effective Email Risk Management to their numerous clients
Background
DigeTekS LLC is an Information Technology consulting services firm based in Firestone, Colorado. Founded in 2005, the company has a highly skilled and experienced engineering staff whose mission is to meet their clients’ IT requirements by bringing them the most effective and appropriate technical solutions.
DigeTekS engineers have extensive experience analyzing, designing, and implementing core network infrastructure and are certified in the leading operating systems, including Novell, Linux, and Microsoft, as well as cutting edge virtualization technologies, such as VMWare, Citrix, Virtual Iron and XEN solutions. The staff is also skilled in performing network and security audits to assess clients’ exposure to external and internal risks. They help determine, document and implement enterprise-class solutions that minimize risks to networks, systems and data. Their services focus on a range of systems from firewalls, core network servers, data storage and backup solutions, to email archiving, anti-virus, and content filtering solutions.
DigeTekS has strong partnerships with select software vendors. These relationships enable the company to provide rapid, expanded support and accelerated escalation services for their client base. DigeTekS’ clients range from very small organizations, to multi-location enterprise, to Fortune 500 companies across the United States.
DigeTekS’ Unique Place: In-Depth Technological Advice and Exceptional Know-How
Once they establish a relationship with a company, the DigeTekS consultants have a very special connection with their clients. In addition to providing them with the necessary technical assistance, they serve as trusted advisors on tackling IT infrastructure issues; in some cases they completely manage some systems on the clients’ behalf. The philosophy behind DigeTekS’ approach is to provide turnkey solutions to clients’ IT projects, which includes planning, recommending solutions, implementation, and full documentation.
Shane Brown, President of DigeTekS, sums it up: "The majority of our clients have been with us for a long time, they trust us and follow our recommendations on design, implementation and technology selection. In some cases, we complement their in-house IT resources with skills and experience they may not have in-house. For example, we have used our comprehensive expertise in Novell technologies to help our clients move from Netware to Open Enterprise Server (OES) and in the process upgrade to GroupWise and deploy IDM and Zenworks. What I mean is that we are able to combine several projects together and update our clients’ IT environment faster and cost effectively."
Partnership with Messaging Architects: Providing Innovative and Cost Effective Email Risk Management for DigeTekS’ Clients
DigeTekS and Messaging Architects have been partners for over five years. Messaging Architects’ technology enables DigeTekS to address the email risk management needs of their clients.
For years now, the consulting firm has seen great success deploying Netmail Secure. When their clients compare it to other email security products on the market, they find it easy to use, superior with regards to both spam catch rates and false positives, and intuitive for end users.
"Netmail Secure is a pretty fast and easy sell for us,' confirms Brown. "Our clients really see the power of the technology and currently we have a lot of Guardian licenses. At the same time, we are also starting to see increased interest in Netmail Archive as more and more companies are realizing that implementing email archiving is no longer optional."
Increasingly, DigeTekS’ clients have to meet eDiscovery and compliance requirements. With Netmail Archive they are able to address these mandates and at the same time achieve a level of storage optimization on their email server. Very often organizations are running out of storage and when a solution can both free up some space and also let them find information faster and be compliant, they are ready to move ahead because they see the potential savings in terms of costs, storage, time, and overhead.
Recently, DigeTekS implemented Netmail Archive at a large school district in Colorado. The net savings for the organization are considerable: by offloading their email to a more affordable storage system, they invested $40,000 for the same capacity that would have cost them $150,000 if they had just added on storage to the email system. In addition to the savings on hardware costs using Netmail Archive, the performance of their email system has improved dramatically and the entire collaboration environment has become easier to manage.
Netmail Archive is also central to DigeTekS’ strategy in dealing with email system upgrades and migrations. Prior to doing any update to a client’s email system, the consulting firm assesses the risks and recommends solutions on how they can be avoided. Centralized email archiving is the necessary first step that ensures a much easier and painless email system migration and future email management.
"Regardless of whether we are helping our clients to upgrade to GroupWise 8 or possibly move to another email platform, we recommend that they introduce centralized archiving," explains Brown. "We think this is the right strategy: by the time we complete the project, we have consolidated their messaging environment and we have made their system ready to meet compliance mandates and discovery requirements. Netmail Archive supports both GroupWise and Exchange environments and from that point of view is a very good investment that will not become obsolete. For us, it is important to recommend technologies that maximize our clients’ limited IT budgets."
In cases when an organization needs to migrate to Exchange, Netmail Archive is a smart investment since it comes with a built-in migration utility and allows DigeTekS to guide their clients through migrations much more painlessly than it has traditionally been.
The traditional approach for GroupWise-to-Exchange migrations has been to take all the email from GroupWise and transfer it all into Exchange, regardless of whether it’s needed or not. There are serious risks to this methodology: messages are lost during the conversion, files get corrupted, storage requirements double or triple, and the overall process can be quite painful for the end users. In addition, a considerable investment in a migration tool is made, which then is discarded.
DigeTekS proposes a different, faster, and more cost-effective alternative with Netmail Archive. The client’s GroupWise system is archived first and then migrated to the new Exchange platform. The benefits are clear: the organization has invested in a long-term solution that allows them to select how much data is migrated to the new system while having access to the legacy archives in a standards-based platform-independent format at all times. Moreover, after the migration they are able to use Netmail Archive to continue archiving email on the new platform.
"In so far as the actual migration process is concerned, it can be done faster using the Netmail Archive migration utility because of all the preparation steps that we can do ahead of time with zero impact on the end users," adds Brown. "Only relevant data is actually injected on the new email system and there is a lot of granularity regarding how much email data needs to be moved based on the different roles of end users."
The bottom line is, when the DigeTekS engineers advise clients on migrations, they remain true to their company’s philosophy in providing their clients with a broader perspective that directly ties in their IT implementations to their business success.
"We are recommending Netmail Archive not only as a migration tool investment, but as a piece of software that will enable our clients to migrate and have an archiving solution in place, thus simplifying long-term email management. This is the strategy we are offering to our clients because we believe it best meets their immediate needs while addressing them from a cost-effective perspective," concludes Brown.
Read the one-on-one interview with Shane Brown, President of DigiTekS.
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