Shipping Company – An IT Health Check Case Study

An international shipping company headquartered in the UK, is a specialist in delivering goods and services to local communities, individuals, and international business affiliates. The company operates globally and continues to build new partnerships with customers of all sizes. The company strategically uses the global network of road, rail, and sea transportation in order to provide international services with a blend of local knowledge to satisfy their customer’s needs.

The Challenge

The company was engaging with a Managed IT Service provider for more than 5 years and was dissatisfied with their service. For an international shipping company, it is of the utmost importance that their IT service provider maintains and supports their IT infrastructure effectively.

An IT Health Check

ProcessFlows offered to help, by providing an independent view of their network infrastructure in the form of an IT Health Check Assessment (ITHC) which provided them with recommendations as to how to improve their IT network and systems. The IT Health Check represents a formal, data-driven assessment and 360° check of an organisations IT health, resilience and data compliance.

The Assessment

After speaking with our IT experts and carrying out an IT Health Check, the company quickly realised that they were not aware of the true state of their IT and they were dealing with an IT service provider that was failing their organisation. Some of the issues identified during the ITHC were:

• Servers weren’t patched with the latest Windows updates
• The server operating systems was no longer supported, presenting a huge security risk
• There was no Anti-Virus installed on many of the servers
• As part of the customers Managed IT contract, they were paying for Anti-virus across all of their devices. The health check revealed this was not the case!
• Unauthorised log-in attempts from outside of the customers network were detected. These were old user accounts that had not been disabled
• Other failed login attempts from old service accounts
• Hard drive failure issues on multiple servers
• Backup service was failing

Not surprisingly, the customer’s overall IT Health score was low, illustrating the badly managed IT network.

The Results

Our team proposed a refresh of their IT infrastructure to replace aging servers and operating systems along with a suite of managed services such as anti-virus, patch management and 24/7 monitoring of all services.