Background
When it comes to quality home construction, New Jersey's Paramount Homes considers itself second to none. Founded in 1995, Paramount's guiding principle is "Reaching for Excellence" and that's apparent in everything they do, from luxurious single family homes to urban redevelopment areas to active adult lifestyle communities. No matter what the project, customers find the company's same commitment to being the best in all of their work.

The Challenge
Before Paramount connected with IT Solutions, the company was experiencing fast growth and more complex tech-nology support needs but was struggling with keeping pace through existing resources. Issues that were causing the most frustration were offsite e-mail hosting through an Internet Service Provider and inefficient backups and disaster recovery techniques. At the time, backups were being handled on a workstation-by-workstation basis, which required significant manual labor that was time consuming and not as reliable as centralized server-driven disaster recovery.

"We just didn't have a cohesive IT network, and we were struggling with Microsoft Outlook and network file sharing due in part to our multiple locations," summarized Paramount's Chief Financial Officer Greg Miscio.

The Solution
Based on IT Solutions' extensive experience with the Windows Server product line and numerous remote office integration projects, Paramount hired ITS to address the challenges through a two-phased project approach. First, the ISP-hosted e-mail solution was replaced with a Microsoft Exchange 2003 system. By bringing mail hosting in-house, Paramount saw immediate benefits with improved communications and increased collaboration. With Exchange and the corresponding Outlook client available to all users, e-mail was now easily monitored and controlled internally. And users could share and update each other's calendars, contacts, and tasks.

Phase 2 involved the implementation of a site-to-site virtual private network (VPN) configured using Cisco Pix Firewalls. ITS accomplished the integration of the eight remote offices with a single domain hosted at the main office. The complete centralization of the network on Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 servers facilitates unified data storage, backups and disaster recovery. For daily tape backup, a large-volume, high-speed LTO drive was installed.

For added security and ongoing preventative maintenance of the entire network, Paramount enrolled in the IT Solutions SharedVision Guardian plan. What attracted Paramount to Guardian was full coverage for both servers and workstations at a predictable flat-fee cost. The deciding factor was the inclusion of the ITS DataVault at no additional charge. DataVault's ability to do daily monitoring and management of disk-to-disk backup jobs using existing backup software filled the remaining gaps in Paramount's need to be able to recover quickly from any catastrophic event.

The Return
In centralizing e-mail, backups, and network security to one location and on complimentary platforms, Paramount Homes has eliminated the inefficiencies and risks that were costly and a source of frustration for the company in the past. By choosing ITS SharedVision, Paramount has the added benefits of 24x7 support from highly experienced Microsoft certified engineers. The team’s constant monitoring of the network keeps costs and downtime under control.

"ITS came in with a comprehensive solution and brought all the resources necessary to complete the project with them," Miscio explained. "They finished our initial network implementation on-time and on-budget in a surprisingly painless manner. I was so impressed with their initial implementation, that we later joined the Guardian Plan and to this day I am very happy having ITS as a business partner."