Case Study

We encountered a new client, Phoenix Plastics, a plastic manufacturing company that was experiencing chronic downtime with their server. As a result, many employees could not access QuickBooks or their inventory tracking program and sometimes this lasted for several hours when the server was down. They had another company that was managing their IT services, and this company could not get the issue resolved.

Through the course of the network audit consisting of one server and 13 workstations, DNE discovered several things that were causing the stress on the network system. Some of the discovery included: inadequate memory on the server, a misconfigured server, the backup system was misconfigured, some systems didn’t have adequate virus protection, and several employees who had left the company still had active accounts. However, the most important discovery was that nobody in the company was aware that all of these issues were occurring.

With the server running on inadequate memory, this could cause system lockups and other failures. It is DNE’s standard practice, a practice that has served us well, to configure all Windows Based Servers with a minimum of 4GB of RAM to promote adequate memory for running a well tuned Microsoft Network.

The intervals in which the backup was configured to run left days between backups which could potentially leave Phoenix Plastics open to losing multiple days worth of information and work. In addition, the data that was selected was not the appropriate data.

The terminated employee’s accounts on the server that were still active were a security risk. If any of these previous employees would have had remote access or access to the building after their employment was terminated, they could have potentially damaged or deleted data files which were critical to day-to-day operations. DNE recommends that companies contact their support provide PRIOR to terminating any employee when possible.

DNE made recommendations to address all of the above issues. With the proposed course of action clearly defined, Phoenix Plastics is experiencing a more effective and efficient computer network. Backups are now streamlined, memory has been expanded, all former employees accounts have been suspended and complete network documentation is being updated.

The result of this work will be significant up time, a more stable and recoverable system, more secure, and most importantly, more productivity as a result of a more efficient computer network.

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