Migrating The Payroll Factory to Virtual IT proved to be not only an interesting IT challenge as well as an opportunity to hone our ability to support new clients on our Virtual IT platform.  The Payroll Factory environment is full of unique needs.  They are especially sensitive to downtime, security assurance is required, and Renee, TPF’s owner is driven to make their business processes more streamlined and ‘green.’

 

Mission Critical - The Payroll Factory handles paychecks. This means that if they go down, someone may not get paid on time.  With an especially acute sensitivity to downtime, Virtual IT is the perfect solution.  If for some reason their internet connectivity at their office goes down, it is trivial to take a laptop to a secure internet connection and continue business as usual off-site.  Downtime of individual desktops is reduces as a new desktop can be deployed for a user in minutes.

 

16-bit DOS applications - Migrating a 16-bit dos application to the Virtual IT was a unique challenge for SymbioSystems technical implementation team.  We were able to not only migrate the application, but document the process so that our ability to support it enhanced.  SymbioSystems also found ways to optimize small portions of this application, (like enabling print to PDF and preventing the application from maxing out a CPU core while executing) that dramatically streamlined paper-reliant business processes.

 

Workspace flexibility - The Payroll Factory is a busy company.  Since the move to the Virtual IT, employees have been able to sit down at any workstation in the office and log in to their own personal work computer.  It has become possible to move from one physical workstation to another and maintain access to the same virtual desktop without even having to close a single program.  Employees can even go home and when they log in, their windows are exactly as they left them at the office.  It’s a truly seamless working experience.

 

High Security - As The Payroll Factory handles money and paychecks, security is of a paramount concern.  Since the migration to the Virtual IT, The Payroll Factory has more options for handing data security, including provisioning a dedicated virtual “banking” machine used exclusively for banking transactions.  Anyone at The Payroll Factory with permissions to do so can log in to the secure machine from any workstation in the office.  Every time that the secure machine is used, it reverts back to a baseline state – meaning that with a fresh restart, the secure machine is guaranteed to be clean of viruses or other malicious software.  If a transaction originates from any other machine, the bank will know and disallow the transaction.

 

Green IT - When SymbioSystems and The Payroll Factory began to collaborate, one of the major initiatives that Renee was working on was achieving a green ‘paperless’ working environment.  They had already made the switch to a paperless file system rather than using old-style file cabinets.  SymbioSystems helped them move towards this goal by consolidating their many scanners into one email-enabled high volume scanner, providing the ability to fax from any program within Windows, and providing better ways to work with PDF files.  Moving forward we hope to get them on a system that sends yearly reports to their clients securely via the internet rather than sending CDs through the mail. 

 

Spam - The Payroll Factory as a company tends to receive more spam email messages than our other clients, and this has been a major annoyance for them in the past.  With the type of work that The Payroll Factory does, false positives from the spam filter are also a major problem.  After moving to the Virtual IT, SymbioSystems has not only been able to drastically cut down the number of spam messages that hit the inboxes of The Payroll Factory employees, but have also been able to customize the filter in such a way that for every false positive they receive, a change to the filtering rules is applied that prevents a similar message from being misdiagnosed in the future.

 

Better Data Backups - When we took over IT support for The Payroll Factory, they had a single server in their office with a tape backup drive that required daily manual tape changes.  Virtual IT completely automates the backup process, and ensures that if something happens to a single physical site, we can bring up their environment on a different set of physical infrastructure.  No longer does Renee have to hope that the tape backup drive is actually doing it’s job.

 

The Payroll Factory is a client with extended IT needs.  SymbioSystems has been able to provide for those needs and at the same time improve upon The Payroll Factory’s business processes through the implementation and migration to Virtual IT.   Check out their website at www.payrollfactory.com to learn more!