415 IT
Leveraging Innovative Technologies to Perfection

Coming from a software engineering and design background, Daniel L. Stevens, Director at 415 IT, found his passion in IT services management where he could solve the complex problems of the business users who were caught up in a quagmire of cutting edge but abundant technologies. With the objective of helping SMBs ‘rightsize’ their adoption of new technologies and improving their productivity, Stevens is leading 415 IT to deliver best-in-class IT services. In an interview with CIO Applications, Stevens shares his insights on their unique approach and expertise through which they help companies drive the ROI of their existing IT investments as well as new technologies.

How do you help your clients tackle their IT challenges?

More than just managing helpdesk services, hardware, and software maintenance cycles, today’s IT services workflow also deals with cloud applications which are frequently ‘too easy’ to setup and use. Many managers make the mistake of creating their own cloud services instances, just for their teams without taking overall company-wide integration and planning. In this way, business users often end up creating ‘information silos’ that may lead to security and privacy hazards. Further, systems integration and business continuity become daunting.

To tackle these evolving challenges in the SMB space, we often utilize web application firewall and monitoring tools to understand their daily activities deeply. At the outset of a client engagement, we hold an active dialogue with the client’s employees and the management to understand their business goals, strategies, requirements, and IT challenges. We review their organizational data, the status of hardware and software lifecycles, browsing patterns, and user needs.

We then use powerful analysis and audit tools to understand their network/cloud infrastructure and identify weak points. Additionally, we also perform automated discovery by deploying tools that generate a detailed report about the applications usage. By fully comprehending client’s organizational guidelines, we provide them with the best practices and suggest methods to fine-tune their approach to leveraging existing technology investments. Empowering individual users to get the most out of their technology drives success for whole organizations.

With every employee requiring IT systems to do their jobs, any outages or downtime must be minimized, and when it occurs, measured in minutes, not hours or days. Frequently people think that because a system is ‘in the cloud’ it does not need to be backed up.

We have found that this is not the case—malicious users or accidents can cause cloud data loss with little to no recourse. Modern backup and disaster recovery solutions straddle the on-premise and cloud spaces to give peace of mind across the whole organization.
Another critical component is cyber security. With workforces becoming more and more mobile, the old-fashioned ‘firewall in the office’ approach is becoming less relevant. Security has been pushed to the individual user computers. As such, 415 IT has heavily invested in tools that allow us to protect our clients in this new model. We utilize DNS based protection, Single Sign On, and two factor authentication to provide a level of protection usually only found in large enterprises.

Can you highlight a client success story that portrays your value proposition?

One of our clients, an accounting firm worked in a standard client/server environment. They were facing numerous challenges: poor security practices were rampant, workstation standardization was non-existent, systems were slow, employee frustration was high. The client was struggling. 415 IT engaged the client and after completing an assessment, identified several key goals:
• Unify the workflow for AP
• Prevent data leakage
• Keep tabs on employee behavior
• Manage systems lifecycles

415 IT was able to quickly design and implement a system to address all of these challenges. Some highlights of the plan:
• Develop custom code to connect document management systems with accounting systems—achieving a complete end-to-end AP workflow.
• Deploy cloud-hosted virtual desktops
• Protect systems with two factor authentication
• Implement data classification and governance
• Implement modern intrusion detection and data loss prevention tools

Additionally, 415 IT provided the client with a whole new way of looking at IT. Systems went from a cost center and a drag on operations to a critical component of business success. The client was able to cut labor costs and grow their client base. This sort of transformation takes strong buy-in from the highest levels of the organization but can lead to massive payoffs in both financial gains and employee satisfaction.

What gives 415 IT the competitive edge in the market?

We are driven by an excellent, skilled team of IT experts who are on a mission to help people use the existing and the upcoming inventive technologies to their fullest. With a firm control over technology, our clients can be highly productive and can have better working experience. Proactive maintenance is at the heart of our operation and this enables us to examine, and re-examine our client’s IT infrastructure with an eye towards constant improvement. This is what differentiates us in the marketplace.

What does the future hold for 415 IT?

On a mission has always been to help businesses improve their performance. While continuing this strategy, 415 IT is focusing more and more on security.We are investing in security operations center to provide enterprise-grade systems for SMBs to perform intrusion detection and monitoring. Techs will monitor customer networks and web activity for threats in real time. We are also adding more programming capabilities to our team. Many cloud systems can go from good to great with the selective use of APIs to automate inter-cloud application communications. This will enable us to go beyond standard cloud service management and in to fully customized solutions.