SECURE DYNAMIC HOSTING
CASE STUDY:
Hispanic Scholorship Fund
Hosted Solution Enables Nonprofit Organization To Dramatically Increase IT Functionality While Slashing Costs 43%.EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The nonprofit Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF) makes college scholarship opportunities available to deserving Latino students and outreach services to help them succeed at college. HSF recently replaced its in-house IT infrastructure and network with a private-cloud solution from PayPerCloud™ (PPC). Among the benefits it has realized are an increase in network uptime from 80% to 99.999%, a 40% increase in application speeds and an ultimate reduction in annual IT costs from $446,000 to $255,000.Revenue
Productivity
User
Efficiency
Capital
Protection
Asset
Compliance
Incremental
Revenue
Increase
Tempered by
any COGS
Increased
Output per
Worker
Worker
Time Saved
Cost
Avoidance
(Staff)
Increased
Output per
Capital Exp
Direct
Cost
Avoidance
Cost
Avoidance of
Liability X
Probability
Insurance
Cost
Avoidance
Cost
Avoidance of
Penalties
(Software etc.)Often
Assumed to
be a
Business
Requirement
Situation
The Hispanic Scholarship Fund is the nation’s leading organization supporting higher education for Hispanics. For the past 35 years, the nonprofit organization has worked to address barriers that keep many Latinos from earning a college degree. In addition to scholarship opportunities for deserv-ing Latino students, HSF offers a broad range of outreach and educational programming to help stu-dents and their families navigate the rigors of col-lege life.
Like many nonprofits, HSF has been hit hard by the economy. Far from being on a growth curve, the or-ganization has had to reduce its staff from a peak of 100. It currently employs 43 people in its main offices in San Francisco and New York and in remote of-fices in Georgia, Texas, Alabama and Colorado and expects to have to reduce that number even further.
“Our situation made it imperative to drive down costs, yet it was equally important maximize productivity,” explained Stephanie Miller, the Director, HR/Admin-istration and Information Technology. “At a time when our growing client base was counting on us more than ever, it was becoming increasingly difficult to come through for them.”
So, how to do more and more with less and less? Like almost every company today, HSF looked to its
The Case For Hosted Solutions:
In addition to increasing productivity and lowering costs, PayPerCloud™ hosted solutions offer the important advantages of instant and infinite scalability, as well as allowing enterprises to focus on their core business. (Data sourced from Forrester Research, Inc.)
Our situation made it imperative
to drive down costs, yet it was equally
important maximize productivity.
the new Director, HR/Administration and Information Technology, was more than ready to comply.
“When I took over direction of the IT department, it was like inheriting Frankenstein’s monster,” Miller ex-plained. “Our in-house IT staff couldn’t cope with the situation, so we were bringing in a lot of consultants at additional cost. Even at that, our network would go down literally every day. We were spending $500,000 a year on IT alone, yet the reliability was terrible; our uptime was only about 80 percent.”
Eric Westrom, Network Services Manager for Pay-PerCloud™, elaborates: “HSF was in dire straits. The IT staff was in disarray, and every major system— email, terminal service, desktop service, the virtual environment—was being mismanaged. There were daily email outages and connectivity issues. Instead of well-coordinated, effective management, they were dealing with multiple vendors, with the inevita-ble buck-passing and a lack of accountability.” HSF’s existing IT infrastructure, which supported 35 desktop computers and 15 laptops, consisted of 10 physical and five virtual servers, with one running ESX and the rest Windows 2003. The new environ-ment now runs applications including Microsoft Ex-change 2010, Sharepoint, Fortis, Sage MIP, Raiser’s Edge, and Lync 2010.
HSF’s network had been assembled by various peo-ple during a period of significant growth over several years. Inconsistencies and a non-standard approach by the IT staff during this time led to problems through-out the entire IT infrastructure that severely impacted HSF’s ability to function.
Hispanic Scholarship Fund
Organization Profile: Nonprofit provider of college scholarships for Latino students, with 43 employees and offices in New York and San Francisco.
Business Situation: A growing client base and shrinking resources led HSF to explore hosted solutions to lower costs and improve reliability of its IT infrastructure.
Solution: HSF chose a private-cloud solution from Pay-PerCloud™.
Benefits: Reduced costs, improved server utiliza-tion, increased employee productivity, stabilized IT environment.
Hosted Environment:
• Exchange 2010 • SQL 2008 R2
• General Application servers • File servers
• Web servers • Domain Controllers • Lync 2010 Standard • Sharepoint 2010 Standard
When I took over direction of
the IT department, it was like inheriting
Frankenstein’s monster.
HSF considered completely modernizing and upgrad-ing their infrastructure, and asked PPC to conduct an audit to determine what would be needed. The find-ings indicated that HSF would be better off to start from scratch and do a complete rebuild. Aside from the time, complexity and capital investment involved, the audit revealed that a rebuild would not yield a suf-ficient reduction of day-to-day costs going forward.
And, based on past history, there was no precluding the possibility that HSF could find itself faced with the same problems at some point in the future.
The alternative was ditching the cumbersome and problematic in-house system in favor of a hosted solution. Miller was familiar with cloud computing from her previous employment, so she proposed migrating to a hosted solution.
HSF management was concerned about making such a fundamental change, but Miller persuaded them to
consider an outsourced option. Among the companies she asked for proposals from was PayPerCloud™. The Professional Services Division of PayPerCloud™ had experience with implementing cloud solutions with other customers who were trying to address the same issues of cost, focus and technical reliability.
“Most of the firms that made proposals seemed focused on large corporations,” Miller said. “PayPer-Cloud™ understood our needs as a nonprofit and was sensitive to our budget issues.”
Even at that, Miller proceeded cautiously. “We hired PPC on a temporary basis to help get our day-to-day situation stabilized. Essentially, we took them for a test drive. We liked what they had to offer and the way they did business. They took the time to fine-tune their solution to match our situation over the course of several presentations. In the end, PayPerCloud™ was an easy choice.”
Solution
Over the course of just seven weeks, PPC designed the solution, acquired all necessary components, tested functionality and developed a transition train-ing program for HSF staff. When everythtrain-ing was ready, PPC migrated HSF from its failing in-house system to the hosted solution over the course of just one weekend. Elements included:
Servers
HSF’s ten existing servers were replaced with two virtual-ized servers onsite, with the balance of server capacity mi-grated to PPC’s Tier 4 datacenter facility, which provides full redundant power, cooling, infrastructure and internet access. A new virtual server environment was created to allow PPC to implement redundant server components.
Driving down costs yet boosting IT performance has become a universal imperative. A hosted solution from PayPerCloud™ should be among the options you consider.
This significantly reduced the space, power and cooling requirements. PPC was able to leverage the tools already in place to ensure the server patch lev-els would be maintained to current standards. An IT refresh cycle for the servers was also implemented. This assured stability and performance would be maintained going forward.
Network Infrastructure
To bring order out of the chaos of HSF’s hardware mish-mash, the core switching infrastructure was standardized using Cisco Layer3 Switches. VLANs were implement-ed to separate server, desktop, printer, management, DMZ and DRAC traffic. Unused internet circuits were consolidated and unused circuits were cancelled. The result was increased performance, complete redundan-cy, much-improved ease of management and greatly increased security.
Active Directory
Since Active Directory is the foundation for the serv-ers it supports, PPC designed and implemented a new Active Directory foundation according to Micro-soft Best Practices. This ended extraneous event log errors being generated on the member servers due to corrupt AD components. This simplified overall network management significantly, while optimizing performance, stability and security.
Exchange/Email
PPC upgraded HSF from Exchange 2007 and migrat-ed user mailboxes to a newly-built clean Exchange 2010 environment. In addition to providing a stable and easily supported email system, Exchange 2010 increased staff efficiency due to feature enhance-ments and improved performance.
PayPerCloud™ hosted-solution clients benefit from fail-proof redundancy and disaster recovery, virtually 100% uptime, the per-formance of best-of-breed hardware and automatic upgrades to the newest versions of software, all for a predictable monthly fee rather than repeated capital expenditures.
Every organization’s situation is different, but the results achieved for the Hispanic Scholarship Fund—IT cost reductions of better than 40%, with significantly increased performance and reliability—are typical of PayPerCloud™ hosted solutions.
Network Security and Disaster Recovery
In addition to installing a dedicated firewall, PPC developed protocols to simplify Group Policy architec-ture. It also guided HSF in implementation of global password policies and an organization-wide Informa-tion Security Policy and put in place auditing policies for all servers. PPC consulted with HSF on the design and documentation of a full disaster and business-continuity plan.
Intranet
Although HSF had already invested in Microsoft SharePoint Server, it had not implemented it. As a result, the organization lacked a cohesive intranet solution. PPC implemented SharePoint Server 2010 to establish an HSF intranet. In addition to reduc-ing overhead costs, this permitted HSF to take ad-vantage of advanced features it previously could
not utilize, further improving productivity throughout the organization.
Software Licensing
PPC’s hosted solution eliminates the need for HSF to purchase licenses for Microsoft software. However, HST uses other applications as well, so PPC con-ducted an audit of HSF’s licenses. Based on the audit, PPC designed and implemented a cohesive licens-ing purchase and management strategy. Among the benefits is ensuring that all licenses moving forward are Charity licenses (rather than Retail), a significant cost savings, and that no licenses are purchased for products not being used.
PayPerCloud™’s solution provides the Hispanic Scholarship Fund with a completely redundant pri-vate-cloud environment for all of HSF’s infrastructure
services. This includes a fully redundant Hyper-V cluster and application servers, including:
• Exchange 2010 • SQL 2008 R2
• General Application servers • File servers • Web servers • Domain Controllers • Lync 2010 Standard • Sharepoint 2010 Standard
The Benefits
Cost ReductionEven with one-time costs associated with migration to a hosted private cloud, HSF reduced its IT costs by 27% and 31% in the first and second years respec-tively and will enjoy a permanent 43% reduction in the out years, as the previous chart illustrates.
Productivity Increase
Now supported by an infinitely scalable and flexible IT infrastructure that performs much faster, with much greater functionality and absolute reliability, HSF em-ployees are no longer hindered by technology from achieving their full productivity potential:
• IT Productivity:Two full-time positions have been eliminated due to reduced maintenance needs.
• Application Performance: Application speeds have increased by 40%
• Reliability: Uptime has increased from 80% to 99.999%
For Stephanie Miller, the hard benefits, as impressive as they are, are more than matched by the
intangi-bles: “The pain has gone away. We are stable at last, with greater options and the ability to grow the techni-cal environment. And the migration went quickly, in just one weekend, with minimal tweaks the following week. That was huge.”
Miller went on to say that the staff has fully embraced the hosted solution and the increased productivity it has empowered them to achieve. Asked what ad-vice she would give other organizations considering a private-cloud solution, she said, “This is the wave of the future. For an organization like the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the ability to house our data offsite and have it managed was compelling. It has been a great decision for us, and PayPerCloud™ has been a great partner.”
Eric Westrom cites a benefit he feels is equally impor-tant: “HSF now has an IT solution that is infinitely flex-ible and scalable, with essentially no further capital investment needed. No matter what the future brings they can adapt instantly.”
PayPerCloud™ Solutions
PayPerCloud™ is a full-service cloud hosting com-pany headquartered in Folsom, California that spe-cializes in creating High-Availability Cloud Hosting Infrastructure and extending Cloud-Enabled Soft-ware Applications to companies that need level infrastructure and stability without
enterprise-HSF now has an IT solution that
is infinitely flexible and scalable, with
essentially no further capital
invest-ment needed.
“
level costs. Our solutions are delivered and backed up with expert-level technical support unmatched in the industry. We create and provide infrastructure that allows any company to gain the maximum flexibil-ity, mobility and security available in the cloud today. Our products and services include:
• Dedicated Private Clouds – A custom-built Private Cloud that you manage
• Public Clouds – Managed or self-directed virtual machines
• Dedicated and Managed Infrastructure Services – A Private Cloud that we manage for you
• Hosted Exchange –Enterprise-Class Email Solutions
• Pay Per Apps – A suite of Software Applications running on our PayPerCloud™ environment that can be accessed anytime from anywhere
• Consulting and Migration Services – Your trusted advisor to get you in the cloud
Contact For More Information
For more information, please call us at 1.877.692-5683 or visit us on the web at
www.paypercloud.com
