EMC
Menu
Jump
Solving Not Band-Aiding Security Problems
Overview
This large financial services firm knew they faced a significant security architecture transformation but were taking a phased approach as they finalized their desired end state. They acquired an endpoint security solution as part of a critical stop gap approach to resolve near-term gaps while providing them more time to design this future state security vision.
Problems
This strategy was significantly challenged, when the non-security focused partner they had leveraged for this acquisition struggled to implement the technology.
Upon the advice of the security technology provider, this client engaged MCS, as a recognized expert in this security solution arena. MCS was able to implement this solution into a production state within weeks, in contrast to the years that the previous provider was forecasting.
The MCS mission is to provide best-in-class cyber security solutions along with expert services to reduce our client’s exposure to business disruption stemming from security attacks or data theft and destruction.
Solution
Despite the rapid implementation approach, MCS still executed its comprehensive discovery approach and uncovered the opportunity to transform this perceived band-aid approach to a more pivotal part of the broader security strategy.
They were able to engage more broadly with the client and help them optimize their security architecture that saved them significant time and money in achieving the security posture they desired.
Ultimately, MCS’s security expertise enabled this client to implement their future state security architecture in half the time that their proposed band aid solution was projected to take. In the current environment where cyber security breaches occur on daily basis, the ability to collapse the timeline to protect their clients and their business was critical.
Financial Optimization
Overview
This client had significant concerns that one of their most critical security components was not financially aligned with the market and was not architected optimally for their environment.
Problems
As a large global transportation firm, they were very conscious that inefficiencies had significant cost impacts due to their scale and complexity. In addition to these concerns, they were facing an audit that they believed was unwarranted and predatory.
Despite the lack of a previous relationship, this client engaged MCS due to their established security expertise to conduct a security environment audit.
The MCS mission is to provide best-in-class cyber security solutions along with expert services to reduce our client’s exposure to business disruption stemming from security attacks or data theft and destruction.
Solution
MCS engaged without expense to the client and conducted a comprehensive licensing consumption and billing audit that only one week to complete. They were very focused on providing insightful results but ensuring that the effort was non-invasive and non-disruptive to the client and was extremely efficient in leveraging any client resources.
The results were compelling, MCS was able to show this client that they had been over-charged by multiple millions of dollars over an extended period of time. Confirming this client’s concerns that they had been mis-aligned and negating the need for a vendor audit.
As a result of this experience, MCS has continued to deliver this customer first approach and their security expertise in support of this client.
Transformation through M&A
Overview
This division of a large global communications provider was struggling with the technology challenges of a rapid acquisition strategy that required the integration of multiple companies, thousands of employees, numerous systems and a footprint that spanned 18 different countries. Their new leadership had a daunting list of objectives that centralized around the need to unify technology platforms, security controls, and applications in order to meet the business and compliance objectives of this new entity.
Problems
Unsure of where to begin, they turned to MCS who was an established and trusted partner in the security ecosystem. With security and compliance, a critical requirement for this global business, this client looked to MCS to architect a solution that encompassed not only the security controls but the entire infrastructure design. Working across the entire technology organization, MCS developed a comprehensive design that encompassed multi-cloud infrastructure, high-availability, security controls and monitoring across 10 datacenters.
They also lead the implementation of this design from program management, technology deployment and the development of an operation and skills model for the new entity to align to.
They also lead the implementation of this design from program management, technology deployment and the development of an operation and skills model for the new entity to align to.
The MCS mission is to provide best-in-class cyber security solutions along with expert services to reduce our client’s exposure to business disruption stemming from security attacks or data theft and destruction.
Solution
This on budget, on time transformation delivered numerous benefits, ranging from financial savings through the standardization and modernization of infrastructure and the optimization of IT staffing through to significantly improved redundancy with a virtualized high availability platform.
More critically, this client was able to achieve their core goals of building an agile and modern technology organization that could better support their business objectives, providing an improved customer and employee experience with unified systems and delivering all of this with a best in class cyber security posture.
Modernizing Applications to Save Lives and Money
Overview
Our client is an innovative healthcare company focused on providing mobile health solutions and remote monitoring services that help patients address the daily risks of living with cardiac arrhythmias. Core to this mission is their ability to connect 500,000 plus patients with physicians while providing actionable data to refine the patient’s diagnosis to reduce the risk of serious medical events.
Problems
To better deliver on this mission, our client wanted to streamline the physician’s user experience and optimize the effectiveness of the data processing engine, but they were limited by the rigidity of the legacy applications that collected, processed, and presented patient data to the physicians for diagnosis.
Adding to the challenge was the complexity and scale of the real-time process because data was sourced from a variety of devices that collected the information directly from the patients during their daily lives, and leveraged a variety of machine learning, artificial intelligence and data transformation services to present meaningful results back to the monitoring centers and ultimately the physicians. Fundamentally, the design of these applications limited the ability to meet the evolving needs from a business and operations perspective.
In combination with these business challenges, our client was facing a significant internal backlog of application development and enhancement work and struggled to find the resources to address this critical need. They turned to Emergys, already a trusted partner working in other areas and together they co-invested in an end-to-end re-imagining of the application that removed the business and financial risk of the venture from our client’s concerns.
By combining our understanding of the customer experience with our digital innovation capabilities, we help clients deliver sustainable business growth with better products, services, and business processes.
Solution
Emergys worked across the business, operations, and technology groups to capture requirements and within a month they produced a mock application and workflow design and defined a proof-of-concept initiative. Upon ratification of the POC, they launched quickly into the design and build efforts and within 6 months of the project kickoff, the new application was launched into production.
Our client was able to deliver significant front-line benefits to physicians by significantly reducing the need to switch between applications and the overall required input and interaction. Additionally, they accelerated the data intelligence functions through automation to provide actionable data when the physicians needed it. Operationally, the new application accommodated the ability to customize workflows by hospital, doctor, event and even patient, providing a streamlined and customized experience for all parties.
Ultimately, our client was able to realize increased revenues due to the ability for the monitoring operations and physicians to greatly scale the number of patients they could provide coverage for, to deliver most importantly, an improved patient care experience.
Using Digital Apps to Remove Friction From the Retail Experience
Overview
Distribution of consumer electronics is a complex business, and this client is responsible for a significant part of the supply chain that distributes televisions to some of the largest retailers in the United States of America. However, they faced an issue with the returns process that was significantly impacting their financials, their customer satisfaction and overall supply chain logistics.
Problems
In an effort to meet the needs of each retailer, the returns process had evolved into a custom process that varied for each retailer. The result was a manually intensive process that required significant dedicated manpower but was still time consuming and prone to errors that resulted in above average financial loss from inventory mismanagement. None of the involved parties ranging from consumer, retailer or distributor were satisfied with the experience or the results.
By combining our understanding of the customer experience with our digital innovation capabilities, we help clients deliver sustainable business growth with better products, services, and business processes.
Solution
Emergys, who was already engaged in this client’s SAP implementation identified this issue during their business process discovery efforts and pro-actively proposed an innovative digital application approach to transform this inefficient business process. They envisioned a self-service portal driven design that would also be integrated with the core enterprise systems for a seamless solution with the compliance and financial controls that addressed everybody’s needs. Additionally, the solution would be provided as a Software-as-a-Service platform ensuring the client’s technology and operations groups did not have to support or maintain it.
The resulting application was extremely successful in addressing all of the business and operational issues that had been identified. The HTML5 based self-service portal allowed any consumer or retailer to access a standardized returns process with real-time status updates that not only transformed the user experience, but it eliminated the errors and mistakes of a manual process.
The integration with the core ERP systems ensured that financial loss was significantly reduced, and the overall logistics process was streamlined. In the end, Emergys’s ability to synthesize their business process, enterprise systems and digital application development expertise was critical in helping their client solve a significant business issue.
Cloud Migration
Overview
A large transportation and logistics provider was facing a critical issue with their technology infrastructure that was threatening their entire business. Their primary datacenter was hosted in 3rd party colocation facility that was suffering numerous and increasingly damaging outages that had resulted in negative business events that impacted our client’s end user customers and had resulted in significant business losses. Threatened with the continued loss of business if the issues weren’t immediately resolved, our client decided they had to urgently relocate their core systems to more reliable environments.
Problem
With speed, risk mitigation and reliability as their key drivers, this client turned to Emergys to migrate their core platforms to AWS. The combination of their deep SAP expertise along with significant experience in building cloud infrastructure and migrating workloads from on-premise datacenters to the cloud, made them the perfect partner.
Solution
Emergys took ownership of every phase from AWS account creation and governance through to the design, build and testing of the high availability infrastructure and SAP application implementation. After only 30 days the entire migration including data replication and testing was completed and the client benefitted from significant performance improvement in addition to achieving the uptime they required.
What began as a business saving event has led to continued digital transformation, with our client continuing to migrate and refactor other legacy applications to the cloud with Emergys providing support and managed services to enable them.
By combining our understanding of the customer experience with our digital innovation capabilities, we help clients deliver sustainable business growth with better products, services, and business processes.
Solution
Emergys took ownership of every phase from AWS account creation and governance through to the design, build and testing of the high availability infrastructure and SAP application implementation. After only 30 days the entire migration including data replication and testing was completed and the client benefitted from significant performance improvement in addition to achieving the uptime they required.
What began as a business saving event has led to continued digital transformation, with our client continuing to migrate and refactor other legacy applications to the cloud with Emergys providing support and managed services to enable them.
Building A Talent Partnership
Overview
Our client is a global non-profit organization with over 16 million members and facilities in over 160 countries that provides nearly $1 billion annually in worldwide humanitarian aid. With the scale and breadth of services provided, this organization has unique challenges in addressing their digital and technology needs.
Problems
A decentralized technology organization structure drives a wide variety of requirements for technical competencies and skills and adding to this are some unique cultural requirements and restrictive geographical parameters. Combining these challenges with the financial constraints that impact every technology organization but are accentuated in non-profit enterprises and this client knew they needed to find a partner that could be innovative, flexible, financially competitive and truly committed to their success.
As an award-winning information technology staffing firm, we specialize in pairing exceptional talent from high value and often constrained skill areas with exceptional companies across the Aerospace Technology, Engineering, Healthcare, Financial Services and other sectors.
Solution
PDS rose to meet these challenges and provide the comprehensive partnership this client needed. Financially, PDS has been able to provide increasingly competitive rates, often providing savings of at least 33% over historical costs, while still meeting the stringent requirements for skills and competency level.
They have delivered value in a variety of engagement types, providing not only technical resource staffing but also end to end outcome-based consulting, development, and implementation projects with defined deliverables. Some of those engagements have been extremely innovative, such as a mobile application that captures real-time incidents and issues at their numerous facilities to ensure their staff addresses critical issues in a timely fashion or an application that leverages machine learning to process and cross-reference image uploads taken in the field all over the globe and match them with critical data in their core databases.
Where PDS has been continually creative has been in addressing the geographic constraints by providing consulting around the development of remote development centers in the United States and near-shore to meet the financial, cultural and geographic constraints of this client.
By providing comprehensive capabilities, financially competitive models and innovative approaches, PDS has established itself as a truly trusted advisor to this client and their continued evolution into a digitally enabled organization.
Defeating Ransomware
Overview
Ransomware has become a “when not if” scenario for many enterprises and the healthcare industry has been aggressively targeted by bad actors in the recent years. This client, a mid-sized health services provider was one of the unfortunate victims of such an attack and had been shut down by a crypto-locker that targeted their core systems.
Problems
Given the critical nature of the services this client provided to patients across their facilities, resolving this issue in an accelerated fashion but while maintaining strict confidentiality was a paramount concern and so they turned to one of their trusted partners.
Solution
As a trusted advisor, A2U immediately deployed a team of six people with the optimal mix of multi-disciplinary skillsets with the singular focus on restoring business operations as quickly and safely as possible. Working with the client, A2U was able to develop a process that leveraged an uninfected backup snapshot and in a joint effort requiring complex co-ordination they were able safely restore each device and machine while also updating with the required patches to ensure that systems were brought back online.
A2U developed, managed and executed a multi-faceted program that restored applications based on business priority and were able to turn over a fully functional environment for core and client systems within 48 hours of initial engagement. In addition to minimizing the business disruption, A2U was able to help this client avoid the payment of an exorbitant ransom.
Upon successful resumption of business, A2U has continued to advise this client on the design and implementation of new operational processes, security and other technology solutions and services to better harden their environments going forward to keep them delivering essential healthcare services to their patients.
A2U solves everyday IT issues across all verticals and company sizes, providing technology solutions, professional and managed services to optimize the value of our client’s technology investments.
Solution
As a trusted advisor, A2U immediately deployed a team of six people with the optimal mix of multi-disciplinary skillsets with the singular focus on restoring business operations as quickly and safely as possible. Working with the client, A2U was able to develop a process that leveraged an uninfected backup snapshot and in a joint effort requiring complex co-ordination they were able safely restore each device and machine while also updating with the required patches to ensure that systems were brought back online.
A2U developed, managed and executed a multi-faceted program that restored applications based on business priority and were able to turn over a fully functional environment for core and client systems within 48 hours of initial engagement. In addition to minimizing the business disruption, A2U was able to help this client avoid the payment of an exorbitant ransom.
Upon successful resumption of business, A2U has continued to advise this client on the design and implementation of new operational processes, security and other technology solutions and services to better harden their environments going forward to keep them delivering essential healthcare services to their patients.