Case Study: Large European Bank.
Client Profile
Why Leave Microsoft Support?
By saving over half a million in hard costs, the Bank was able to continue with their vital digital transformation efforts as planned. This modernization of their consumer-facing systems was seen as a strategic imperative, but not mission critical to ongoing operations. The effort would have likely been curtailed and the Bank would have fallen farther behind newer, more nimble competitors.
In addition, there had been significant dissatisfaction with responsiveness under Microsoft. There was concern that a smaller US-centric company like US Cloud would not be able to support them well in their time zone. However, a year in, IT has been extremely pleased with responsiveness and the Bank is now a regular reference client for US Cloud.
Why Switch to US Cloud
The Bank’s Procurement team was tasked with finding a viable alternative and after an international RFP it was established that only Microsoft and US Cloud could reliably support their Microsoft infrastructure. Following detailed evaluation and vetting by the Bank’s IT leadership, the Client opted to take the risk of moving to a third-party and save the money on support costs.
Benefit
By saving over half a million in hard costs, the Bank was able to continue with their vital digital transformation efforts as planned. This modernization of their consumer-facing systems was seen as a strategic imperative, but not mission critical to ongoing operations. The effort would have likely been curtailed and the Bank would have fallen farther behind newer, more nimble competitors.
In addition, there had been significant dissatisfaction with responsiveness under Microsoft. There was concern that a smaller US-centric company like US Cloud would not be able to support them well in their time zone. However, a year in, IT has been extremely pleased with responsiveness and the Bank is now a regular reference client for US Cloud.
Support Example
An Unexpected Boost to Security by a New Partner
I honestly didn’t think US Cloud could resolve issues for us during our regular business hours because of the time zone difference, but we needed the savings. We were pleasantly surprised at their responsiveness and have not looked back.
—Jan S., Chief Technology Officer
The Bank suddenly found that none of its employee users outside their corporate offices could login and access their SharePoint site. This was critical for retail operations as the company used this as their primary information sharing and distribution system, with dozens of forms and documents critical for day-to-day retail branches.
The breakdown was causing significant disruption to their business, bringing many branches to a standstill on processing new loans, account transfers, etc.
Internal Help Desk staff had been attempting to solve the issue before the branches hit the busy lunch hour, but with no success.
A US Cloud ticket was opened and after an initial quick response and triage with a trained Crit Sit Manager, a Premier engineer was engaged within 30 minutes. After digging into recent activity with the Client it was discovered that the certificate for SharePoint servers had been updated very recently. US Cloud determined that this was most likely the cause of the problem and advised the Client to import the “SharePoint Root Authority” certificate to the Trusted Root Cert store on all SharePoint servers. The client completed that step and the log-in ability for all users was restored. Most importantly, the issue was resolved early enough in the day to avoid any significant loss of business.
