Case Study: Managed Services
Lifeline Technology Solutions securely scaled their operations with comprehensive managed services solutions and support from AximCloud.
About Lifeline
Lifeline Technology Solutions is a Managed IT Service Provider in Cranford NJ. For over 20 years we have been helping local SMB’s protect their organizations against the constantly evolving threats of the digital world. We ensure that your Networks are secured, your critical data is safe and your client devices are protected.
Lifeline specializes in providing personalized IT services to SMBs who lack access to an in-house IT staff.
Lifeline has seen a 10-fold increase in users, across multiple sites. We wouldn't be able to securely and cost effectively service this customer growth without AXIMCloud's help. AximCloud is known throughout the region as a trusted partner who knows how to deliver the foundational flexibility needed to support critical data assets and IT operations. Their knowledge and experience with compliance regulations for our public sector customers, security platform integration (identity and access management), and data protection and recovery makes AximCloud the trusted strategic partner for both Lifeline and the customers we serve.
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As we began to migrate and modernize some of our customers’ critical workloads to realize cloud-scale economics and security benefits, we needed a partner with proven AWS expertise to rapidly provision, manage and support this environment. A trusted advisor who could not only build and maintain, but also strategically design solutions that optimize performance, accessibility, and availability without impacting on the security posture or data protection requirements that our customers have come to expect. In this region, for our customers, that partner was AximCloud.”
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We chose AximCloud, because their expert engineering team knows everything about the AWS cloud, so that we don't have to. They had the ability, the experience with similar companies in our industry, and more importantly the culture of partnership that we needed to help us now and into the future.
Jason Michaels, Owner, Lifeline Technology Solutions
The Ask
When a leading regional MSP and IT security solutions provider needed a strategic partner to help them deliver cloud scale economics and security for their customers, they turned to AximCloud. A certified AWS Advanced Tier Service Provider with the skills and experience required to build, manage and more importantly scale the architecture necessary to support their disparate end user customers.
Lifeline presented AximCloud with non-negotiable "must-haves" for their customers' cloud deployments: scalability, performance, security, and cost.
Security
Lifeline provides IT support services for 100s of companies with 1000s of users accessing supported systems from an unlimited and unknowable number of devices. The cloud implementation must integrate with the existing IdP and directory service.
Data Access
The VPN design must be secure, easily accessible, and cost effective. The storage and compute must be reliable, scalable, recoverable and performant.
Operational Costs
Lifeline needed to spend their time and expertise supporting and servicing their customers, not managing and securing their IT Infrastructure.
Analysis and Design
After a detailed assessment of Lifeline’s applications, infrastructure, security posture and data protection requirements, AximCloud deployed Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Windows Server. Migrating to the cloud eliminated hardware, licensing, and support costs associated with physical on-site servers. Enhanced security and protection were delivered with Active Directory integration and Shadow Copy configuration. Connectivity and accessibility were delivered through secure, scalable VPN services. AximCloud resolved a difficult wireless adapter driver issue along the way.
24/7 Monitoring
AximCloud's experts pre-built the target environment based on Lifeline's requirements and existing workloads. This made the installation fast and easy, without any operational impact. After successfully provisioning and deploying Lifeline's workloads, AximCloud began providing 24X7 managed services and support. Using industry best practices, AximCloud's proven DevOps methodology, and leading AWS tools such as: AWS CloudFormation, AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and AWS Systems Manager, Lifeline now enjoys stress-free scalable operations knowing their customers data and applications are secure, monitored, audited and optimized for both cost and performance.
Security and Compliance
As we do with every customer we on-board, we provided a security and regulatory compliance audit before and during the installation, using AXIMCloud's expert guidance and AWS tools.
Results
AximCloud now handles tasks such as backup and recovery, patching and updates, scaling and provisioning, trouble ticketing and issue resolution. Freeing up Lifeline to focus solely on serving their customers and the communities they support. The policies, procedures, and standards implemented and enforced by AximCloud ensure security, availability, and compliance across the Lifeline install base.
The implementation was planned, provisioned, documented and completely seamless to Lifeline's operations. There has not been a single incident of unplanned downtime since AximCloud assumed operational responsibility. Now, Lifeline can focus on their customers IT operations and security demands without worrying about the back end cloud infrastructure. Lifelines' customers are able to take advantage of a flexible cloud infrastructure that scales on demand and provides a pay as you go pricing model for only the resources they use. Lifeline is operating at peak efficiency and knows that AximCloud, as a strategic partner, will continue to refine and optimize as new technologies and approaches become available.
Every AximCloud customer can expect:
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Lower costs and higher efficiency
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Guidance and support
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Faster stress-free migrations, updates, and operations
Ongoing Benefits
Higher Availability and Reliability
Historically, companies reduce their unplanned downtime by 69% after migrating to the AWS cloud. AximCloud customers have achieved even better reliability and availability results
Lower Costs
By using AximCloud for both cloud migration and managed services, Lifeline was able to realize more than 50% reduction in total cost of ownership..
Data, Application, and Business Agility
Data and applications can now scale on demand to handle peak loads and spikes in traffic without compromising performance or availability.
Orchestrate your Managed Services with AximCloud
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has helped thousands of organizations migrate to the cloud and modernize their infrastructure and applications. From lower costs to increased speed, migrating and modernizing with AWS helps businesses reimagine how they work and innovate. These organizations benefit from improvements in productivity, business agility, and operational resilience.
AximCloud, and their strategic partner AWS, work with businesses at every stage of the digital modernization journey ― from assessing business needs to planning and executing the migration ― and delivers proven tools, methodologies, and expertise that accelerate hassle-free migrations to the cloud.​
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Expertise proven and trust gained, AximCloud will continue to provide deeper, and more valuable, support, security, and optimization services for Lifeline and its customers. Performance and cost optimization are core pillars within the AWS Well-Architected Framework. For more than 10 years, AximCloud has been continuously improving the business outcomes of Lifeline's customers, all without disruption. Moving forward , we will continue to apply industry best practices, our proven expertise and methodology to address ever changing security, compliance, and , business requirements of it's customers.