With advanced, state-of-the-art facilities, Lago Cold Stores wanted to ensure its’ IT services were equally innovative, built to go the distance and designed to minimise business risk.

Cold Storage Business Outsources IT Functions

 The Challenge

With almost 5 decades of operating experience, Lago Cold Stores is one of Queensland’s leading cold storage firms. A family owned and operated business, Lago have specialist expertise in cold storage solutions but wanted to ensure their IT infrastructure and systems were robust and fully supported core operations. With no desire to expand an in-house IT team, Lago wanted an outsourced partner who would manage their IT systems and who would align with their company family values.

The Solution

andersenIT were engaged by Lago to provide key legacy IT support in the areas of:

• Guidance and direction on all hardware including servers and network devices
• Operating system health, including both Windows and Linux
• Platform system health, including database and email system admin
• Overall network performance and health
• Desktop standard operating environment
• Ongoing monitoring and support of all network components and applications

The ability to provide flexibility in specialist resource requirements was key to the implementation success as Lago’s in-house IT team ranged in size anywhere from zero to three at any given time. In order to provide adequate support, andersenIT was able to assign the right amount of resources as required at various times in order to complete projects and support tasks and meet on SLA deliverables.

The Result

andersenIT have provided day-to-day support for Lago legacy systems for over 12 years. In 2014 a number of strategic initiatives were implemented in order to reduce inherent network risk including:

• Replacement of Linux and Windows servers
• Implementation of high availability, multi-location, replicated server environments (Windows and Linux)
• Replacement of storage infrastructure
• Improvements to monitoring and alerting systems
• Implementation of a Terminal Services environment to replace PC’s
• Implementation of a standard operating environment
• Full review of Backup and Restore facilities health

Most day-to-day support is handled remotely, with only occasional site visits required. As new projects are rolled out, key staff at Lago and andersenIT meet regularly to discuss project updates and to ensure progress is in line with strategic objectives.

Lago has taken steps to mitigate risk and is now in a strong position in relation to their business dependent IT platform and its support.

"andersenIT have provided Lago Cold Stores with exceptional guidance and implementation services and now support the IT strategic plans developed in conjunction with us"