ITS Helps This Entertainment Construction and Supply Company Reduce IT Stress

Working with theaters, casinos, churches, performing arts centers, and more, this client handles the custom manufacturing of stage curtains, lighting and dimming systems, curtain tracks and rigging, and integrations, to name a few. They have four offices across the country, staffed by more than 80 team members.

In order to keep their offices connected and their staff members productive, this entertainment construction and supply company requires a robust and functional IT environment. That’s why they work with IT Solutions.

“We’re an all-hands-on-deck kind of company,” says the VP of Business for this entertainment construction and supply company. “We did not have an IT person; we had a guy who was good with IT.”

Before this client invested in fully managed support, they had handled IT internally. Up until recently, their approach to processes was largely a matter of “all hands on deck”; if something needed to get done, someone would handle it.

That included their IT. Instead of hiring an IT professional, they simply had one of their current staff members take on IT management tasks. As knowledgeable as they were, however, this arrangement was less than ideal.

Managing the company’s IT took a lot of this staff member’s time and made it difficult for them to make progress on their other work. Furthermore, if they were ever unavailable, sick, or worse, it would put this client’s business in a very vulnerable position.

“You are putting yourself at huge risk if that person is incapacitated or no longer available,” says the VP.

This client’s leadership knew that outsourcing their IT support would be much more expensive than simply having a staff member take care of it for them. All the same, they recognized that by properly handling their IT workload, they could eliminate vulnerabilities, downtime, and more.

Recognizing the vulnerability of their current IT management model, this entertainment construction and supply company’s leadership began looking for professional IT support near the end of 2019. In speaking to her colleagues, the VP was eventually referred to IT Solutions and another IT company.

“Our software vendor had given me somebody else that they had recommended, so it was just the two companies that I vetted,” says the VP.

After speaking to the two companies, it was clear to this client that ITS was the right choice. They understood that ITS would only be able to provide remote support to their offices, but they knew what they stood to gain by outsourcing.

“We knew what the savings were going to be, just in terms of better management,” says the VP.

The staff at this client’s business immediately benefitted from our assistance because they no longer had to deal with IT issues on their own. The staff member that had been unofficially handling their IT could finally get back to focusing on their own work.

“I was able to pull the IT guy away from the IT stuff, which I really needed to do,” says the VP. “He was extremely stretched.”

Printer configuration problems, password resets, and other tedious, daily IT support tasks were now being outsourced to the ITS team. This freed up a lot of time for the VP and other mid and high-level team members at this entertainment construction and supply company.

“ITS has taken away the constant barrage of IT issues,” says the VP. “All those annoying kinds of IT support things that my office managers and I were having to take care of on a day-to-day basis are now handled by ITS.”

This alone is a game-changer in the quality of the staff’s daily work. They don’t have to worry about being pulled away from their work or splitting focus because someone’s printer won’t work. They can trust that ITS is taking care of it.

“It’s huge, not to have to deal with it,” says the VP.

Another reason this client sought out professional IT assistance is because of their cybersecurity. They had been worried for some time that they were vulnerable to an attack and assumed it was only a matter of time before they were hacked.

Fortunately, they partnered with ITS before anything truly damaging occurred. In handling their IT, ITS assessed this business’s cybersecurity measures, identified vulnerabilities, and eliminated them.

“Our equipment is safer,” says the VP. “We were really stressed about security before ITS. We knew that we had tons of security holes.”

For example, ITS discovered that this client’s networked printers had all been left unprotected and open to external access. The main reason that printers like that are such an area of concern is that, unlike conventional printers that connect directly to a computer, networked printers have sophisticated internal hard drives and CPUs that process and store data, and run on their own software.

This gives hackers something to work with, and without the right endpoint protections in place, security breaches are almost inevitable. Networked printers store every scan they perform on an internal hard drive, which is often left unsecured and ready for hackers to access. That’s why it’s so important to recognize and treat the printer as a part of the business’s IT infrastructure; whether it’s wired or on the Wi-Fi network, it needs to be properly secured.

“We knew we didn’t have the expertise to do what we needed to do,” says the VP.

Since partnering with IT Solutions, this client has enjoyed seamless and effective support for their entire organization.

“I sleep better at night,” says the VP.

That’s what this entertainment construction and supply company’s team wants from their IT. They want to be confident it will work as expected, day in and day out. It needs to be responsive and secure—and with ITS’s help, that’s what they get.