3 min read

IT Managed Services Partner Story

Phil Taylor is managing director of Cryoserver partner IT Managed Services Limited (ITM), based in Skelmersdale, Lancashire, England. Founded in 2007, ITM is a remote, outsourced help desk for small to medium-sized companies. Since its early days it has focused on cloud-based systems. Phil says, “We saw that hosting systems in data centres, rather than on premise, was an important feature for the future.”  ITM customers aren’t technical people; they’re business people who rely on Phil’s team to be their IT department. Smart card manufacturing, waste management, transport and law are just a few examples of the types of businesses they run. While most have between 10 and 25 employees, it was a much larger customer that led to ITM’s partnership with Cryoserver.

A customer learns the hard way

This company came to ITM about eight years ago, desperate for help. They were a construction firm of about 600 employees. Their problem is a reminder of how valuable old emails can be, and how important it is to archive them securely.

The firm’s contract manager had agreed extras to a contract with a client which ran into hundreds of thousands of pounds. When they came to bill their client several months later on completion of the contract, the client said that they didn't know anything about the "extras to contract" and asked for evidence. The problem was, the contract manager had left the construction company – and emptied his mailbox, which had contained the evidence. Despite ITM’s attempts to retrieve the emails, as there was no secure archiving solution in place, the emails were lost forever – along with a substantial amount of money owing to the construction firm.

Naturally, the firm wanted to prevent a repeat of such a data loss. So they hired ITM to find a solution.

Phil’s email archiving challenge

“We looked at a number of competing solutions,” Phil says. ITM and the customer decided they needed an email archive that was:

  • cost-effective
  • easy to implement
  • easy to access
  • low maintenance.

In addition, the email repository needed to be evidential – capable of preserving data that could serve as evidence in court.

Why they chose Cryoserver

Of all the solutions ITM looked at, including Barracuda and MailStore, one ticked all their boxes: Cryoserver.

“We arranged a demonstration with [the construction firm],” Phil says. “We showed them how simple and easy it was. We showed them how cost-effective the onboarding [and ongoing service] were – Cryoserver was by far the most cost-effective solution. It was a no brainer, frankly, and they said yes.”

He and his customer liked how our solution “just sits there and does its job, day in and day out”.  They also appreciated how each employee could retrieve their own old emails, while people in authority, who we call Data Guardians, could access the entire archive, searching, printing, and producing copies.

So, ITM became our partner, and the construction firm became a Cryoserver customer. Since then, many other ITM customers have adopted our email archiving solution.

“Their feedback has been really positive,” Phil says. “Once they have it and start using it they wonder how they ever coped without it.”

Great value email archiving

These small businesses are reaping the same benefits that organisations with 1,000s of employees get from Cryoserver. At minimal cost, too. A business of 10 people pays approximately £3 per user per month. That’s about £30 in total per month for a best-of-breed email archiving solution – a small price to pay to protect valuable, possibly even business critical, data, some of which may be needed to settle a disagreement like Phil’s first Cryoserver customer’s, ot to defend against a vexatious claim.

ITM employees use Cryoserver themselves. “We think it’s wonderful,” Phil says. He and his colleagues find it quick and easy to use when searching for emails or any email attachments in their archive. Likening our search tool to Google, he says you find what you want from a huge store in seconds. Also, our solution enables ITM to keep only one year’s worth of emails in Outlook; after a year, emails there are automatically deleted, while archived copies remain in Cryoserver.

Over the years, Phil’s customers have occasionally needed our support. He cites upgrades, and hardware failures – which, he hastens to add, were not Cryoserver’s fault – where the customer needs some help in getting our solution back online and up to date. He says, in all these instances, our support team “were absolutely brilliant. They are very knowledgeable people, very pleasant. They do things at the right time and in the right way.”

Book a demo

If you’d like to see how our email archiving solution can help your business, or your customers’, book a demo here, email us, or call us on 0800 280 0525.

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