Dolan Foster Chooses NetCentral for a Fully Managed Network

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Dolan Foster Enterprises operates over 60 restaurants in California. They handle personnel, financial and supply chain functions for all the locations.

With so many active properties working, it is important that the staff at Dolan Foster focus their attention fully on the operation at hand. Information Technology tools can help tremendously, but only if choosing, maintaining and managing those tools doesn’t take up too much time.

Dolan Foster’s CFO, Paul Luce, realized that he could get the best value from his IT investment if he partnered with a company that specializes in managing IT assets. He was looking for more than just a go-to company for repairs or upgrades. He wanted Dolan Foster’s IT infrastructure to be fully managed.

NetCentral Handles All of IT

Paul met with Clare Computer Solutions, and he saw that their NetCentral network management would be ideal.

The service plan he chose provides around-the-clock monitoring of Dolan Foster’s key network elements, and provides a comprehensive plan for ongoing maintenance and management of the company’s network.

In addition, he saw the value of NetCentral’s data backup and disaster recovery (BDR) service and had this implemented as well.

The implementation of the NetCentral service went smoothly as agents were installed on workstations and server to report back to the NetCentral Network Operations Center (NOC).

Immediately, if any conditions were detected that might indicate a problem, alerts were generated by the NOC engineers and then escalated to the NetCentral HelpDesk if further attention was needed.

Monthly reports are generated and sent to Paul withy data on how the network is doing, providing trending data for long term planning.

NetCentral Backup and Disaster
Recovery Prevents a Big Problem

One incident in particular illustrates the value of the level of coverage provided by NetCentral: On a day when payroll was due to be processed for all the restaurant locations, the server that handles payroll crashed with a serious hardware failure.

Normally, the amount of time to set up a new server, and restore data from backup – if in fact a good backup was available – would be a whole working day, and perhaps two, depending how fast a replacement server could be delivered. In this case, the Dolan Foster’s BDR device was pressed into service as a virtual server and they were able to service their payroll within 2 hours.

NetCentral’s combination of proactive and reactive support for Dolan Foster’s network keeps small issues small, and quickly mitigates the effect that larger issues might have on the business. The end result is peace of mind for a very busy CFO.