When a large Financial Services client needed a staff replacement with specialist skills who could hit the ground running, with no transition pain experienced, andersenIT was tasked with filling the gap – quickly.

IT skills backfill is business as usual

The Challenge

A common challenge that many companies face is dealing with difficult and often unforeseen requirements. For one andersenIT client in the financial services sector, the challenge came when a key staff member suddenly and unexpectedly needed to take a long-term leave of absence due to illness, leaving the client without the essential skills needed to perform critical IT functions. Since they already had an ongoing Service Agreement in place with andersenIT, it made them the natural choice for the client to turn to for support. andersenIT provided ongoing support to the client to ensure their core IT infrastructure environment continued to be reliable, available and stable.

The Solution

andersenIT’s Service Delivery Manager met with the client to determine the exact requirement. A Storage & Backup Specialist with a wide range of skills in configuring, allocating and analyzing usage of storage systems and backups was needed for an initial period of 2 months, which was later extended beyond 6 months. The requirement was for an experienced Storage Specialist to become a virtual extension of their team, able to handle and manage complex technical tasks, and work closely with peers. andersenIT was able to provide a staff member with the appropriate skills to fill the gap at the client’s business. He was able to seamlessly fit in with the IT team, with day-to-day supervision coming directly from the client.

The Result

Because of the close skillset match, andersenIT were able to provide a staff member who could:

• Administer a large back-up and recovery environment running IBM Tivoli Storage Manager
• Install new TSM agents on UNIX and Windows servers
• Migrate off and decommission older Enterprise storage systems
• Provision more storage to production and Disaster Recovery systems
• Plan and upgrade SVC and Brocade switch firmware
• Upgrade SAN Fabric capacity
• Manage vendor response to hardware failure

In addition, the andersenIT staff member was able to successfully migrate storage from an IBM DS8100 to an EMC platform and then plan and decommission the DS8100. This resulted in significant savings for the client on hardware maintenance.

The solution meant that there was no interruption to the client’s business as usual activities, there was no requirement to go through the time consuming task of sourcing a temporary hire, and no staff skill training was needed.

“They are specialists who understand our business, technologies and our industry and their ability to quickly provide seamless and valuable additional resources and expertise, and function as a virtual extension of our team, was invaluable.”