Crystal Mountain Unlocks Operational Efficiency and Optimizes Workload Affordably With Kaseya NOC Services
Overview
A lot goes on behind the scenes at an all-season resort to ensure guests have an exceptional experience — and IT management plays a huge part in that. Shawn Edie, Director of IT, has a team of just five IT professionals, and together they manage more than 600 endpoints for Crystal Mountain. In many ways, Crystal Mountain is a small city. The resort provides water, sewage, gas, electricity, phone service and internet to more than 250 lodging accommodations plus staff.
Before the Crystal Mountain IT department partnered with Kaseya NOC, there were a lot of early mornings and late nights to ensure everything ran smoothly at all times. Now with Kaseya NOC, the workload has been reduced and the IT team has less stress and more time to move forward with critical projects. In addition, Kaseya NOC provides valuable insights and data, leading to better results and increased efficiency.
This is their story.
About
Crystal Mountain is a four-season, family resort located in northwest Michigan, about 15 miles from the Lake Michigan shoreline. The premier Midwest destination is popular for skiing in the winter, golf in the summer, and home to the No. 1 spa in Michigan, according to Spas of America. Whatever the season, Crystal Mountain is the place to go to have fun and connect with self, nature and others.
Working with Kaseya NOC has allowed the IT team to grow professionally and become technically proficient. They get to work on unique, challenging tickets and have time to learn from one another and teach each other their specific strengths. Shawn EdieDirector of Information Technology at Crystal Mountain.
Challenges
Prior to Kaseya NOC, a typical day for the Crystal Mountain IT department involved overseeing server and disk management, monitoring the website, patching devices, remediating alerts and troubleshooting common system issues. Plus, the team fielded 140 tickets per day for routine issues such as password resets, new user setups and questions about Microsoft Office. On a good day, these tasks could take up to 2-3 hours of the team’s crucial time.
To help reduce the workload and repetitiveness and to boost morale within the IT department, Shawn started searching for NOC services.
Solutions
After looking at several options, Crystal Mountain chose Kaseya’s NOC Services because it offered the coverage they needed at an affordable price. Shawn found Kaseya’s price point was much lower than the competition, even while providing more services. This, coupled with positive past experiences with Kaseya products and services, led Crystal Mountain to move forward with Kaseya NOC.
Crystal Mountain currently uses six Kaseya products, including the best-in-class remote monitoring and management tool VSA. Kaseya NOC helps handle the daily task list and many routine, time-consuming service desk tickets. Working with a NOC that understands Kaseya products used by the resort proved to be an added advantage.
With more time at their disposal, the Crystal Mountain IT team became more efficient and productive and progressed with tasks that mattered. Moreover, not being constantly under the gun to meet deadlines helped them approach problem-solving creatively and innovatively. It was also easy for Crystal Mountain to amend its NOC service contract with Kaseya when they realized they had to add server and patch management to the roster.
Recently, Kaseya NOC rejected three patches for Crystal Mountain since other clients had issues with them. It was a huge plus for the resort because they could rely on the NOC team to keep their systems up to date and secure without fear of a system malfunction. Even before Kaseya NOC took over patching, Shawn had been leveraging the software management feature of VSA to manage patches effectively. Lastly, the daily task-completion reports from the NOC have helped the resort streamline the process and get more done while living stress-free.
Results
By outsourcing routine tasks to Kaseya NOC, the Crystal Mountain IT team could devote more time to critical projects and better manage their workload, increasing efficiency and productivity. While Kaseya NOC took care of the housekeeping, technicians found the time to assist the application engineer in keeping critical tasks in order. The NOC partnership also allowed Shawn to have more time to plan.
In addition to freeing up the team, Kaseya NOC significantly reduced Crystal Mountain’s service desk load and improved ticket resolution time, helping the team grow professionally and technically. With the work better organized and planned, the team can now focus on more challenging tasks, collaborate on projects and learn from each other, ultimately benefitting themselves and the company.
