Connecticut's IT Managed Services Blog

Overview

When you are in the technology business, infrastructure is everything. To provide reliable technical solutions and network services to customers, you need to make sure that your own enterprise networks are up and running 24/7. However, if maintaining enterprise systems isn’t part of your core expertise, it often makes better economic sense to outsource it.

That was the challenge that Bozzuto’s Retail Technology Services (RTS) faced. Bozzuto’s RTS maintains business-critical staffing and stocking solutions for grocery and specialty stores along the Eastern Seaboard. They work with networking experts like NSI to ensure that their operations continue to run efficiently, and can get back online quickly in the case of a systems failure.

The Challenge

Technology, like everything else, is subject to Murphy’s Law – when you need it the most, it will fail.

Bozzuto’s RTS provides business-critical software and technology to grocers and retailers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, and without their enterprise network, they have no product. RTS delivers sophisticated networking solutions to help stores manage and market their businesses, including systems for employee time management, inventory and stocking control, mobile and digital marketing, and more. Their Salesplan technology, for example, uses high-speed networking to integrate with point-of-sale (POS) systems to manage sales transactions and help store owners manage margins, pricing changes, and new inventory.

Like many businesses, RTS lacked a disaster recovery plan. Their customers depend on RTS’s services and data, so it is essential for RTS to have a reliable disaster recovery plan to restore data on premise and in the cloud. However, like many companies, data backup is not always high on IT’s priority list. In fact, 53 percent of businesses report that they do not back up data on a daily basis, and 32 percent report that daily backups are not an effective use of their time and resources.

Since the company’s customers run their businesses on RTS’s network data, the RTS management team started to shop for outsourced backup solutions that would provide reliable system archiving and recovery without adding substantial overhead. After talking to a variety of managed service providers, they selected NSI to handle their data backup needs.

A Solution

NSI talked to the executive team at RTS at length about the company’s networking strategies. NSI was able to develop a strategy to correct multiple networking issues, including consolidating data backup. NSI elected to use the data protection solution from Datto, which combines an on premise system that can spin up failed servers with secure cloud backup services.

Ironically, RTS had to test their data backup systems sooner than anticipated. The new backup infrastructure was set up on Monday, and on Wednesday RTS suffered a server failure. The IT manager rebooted one of the RTS servers and it failed to come back up. Since NSI had already installed the backup system, they were able to get the server up and running within 15 minutes.

“Every business needs to be concerned about business continuity,” said Tom McDonald, founder and President of NSI. “Every operation can benefit from a partner dedicated to monitoring the systems that keep the data flowing. When you have a dedicated managed services partner watching your back-end, you can focus on what’s really important—meeting the needs of your customers.”

About Bozzuto’s Retail Technology Solutions

Bozzuto’s RTS provides affordable, effective retail technology solutions for grocers and retailers throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, including employee time management, inventory management, stocking, sales planning, and in-store and online marketing solutions. The company specializes in providing secure, high-speed networking solutions that help stores run more efficiently, improving the bottom line by simplifying back end business processes so retailers can focus on their customers. For more information, visit rts.bozzutos.com.

About NSI

With headquarters in Naugatuck, NSI offers complete IT support services to small and medium-sized businesses across Connecticut. NSI provides its clients with a personal IT support team responsible for monitoring, updating, and correcting IT problems to keep their businesses operational. To help keep its customers’ systems running, NSI offers TotalCare, a smart, proactive solution that prevents systems downtime and data loss while reducing the costs associated with managing servers, computers, and corporate data.