The Immigration Center for Women and Children (ICWC) is a non-profit legal organization providing affordable immigration services to underrepresented immigrants in California. ICWC has four locations in California to better serve underserved communities throughout the state. In eight years of existence, ICWC’s legal service delivery model has proven to be very successful in the greater Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego areas. To date, ICWC has served more than 5,000 women and children.
Business Challenge
In-House Server Limits Productivity, Exposes Vulnerability
With four offices throughout California, each with teams working concurrently and collaboratively, remote connectivity to large amounts of data and having the same system at every location was essential. ICWC’s in-house server could not keep up with the rate at which they were expanding, and the need to continually replace and patch their technology limited productivity and efficiency.
ICWC’s reliance on internal systems for their main and backup servers made them vulnerable. The cost of replacing their current hardware and software, much of which was no longer supported or soon would not be, appeared daunting. In the event of an unforeseen disaster, the costs of restoring information would be extremely time intensive, costly and potentially insurmountable. Although ICWC relied on their own IT technician, daily troubleshooting and network updates eroded employee productivity, and the support could not completely compensate for the antiquated systems and issues.
The Solution
Mobility and Security of a Virtual Work Environment
To this end, ICWC migrated away from their internal servers and networking infrastructure to Abacus Private Cloud where they utilized the mobility and security of a virtual work environment to facilitate collaboration and synchronization for their cases and staff in each location.
The Abacus Private Cloud team and ICWC’s IT technician worked together to quickly and successfully migrate the firm to Abacus Private Cloud, which currently remains ICWC’s single-source solution. Each office location experienced a smooth transition as all necessary software applications, including AbacusLaw, were installed. Likewise, ICWC’s large amounts of confidential data were migrated with a high degree of fidelity in accordance with NIST standards.
The Results
Private Virtual Office Environment Scalable and Flexible
ICWC instantly experienced an improvement in collaboration amongst all four California offices with each staff member working with real-time, central access to shared files, folders, and pertinent client data on their corporate drive. The team noticed the increased speed and responsiveness of their environment immediately, thus improving their own quality of client service. Their company’s IT technician could now focus on being “boots on the ground” for setting up office hardware, such as workstations and phones, instead of handling IT headaches stemming from patching, restoring, and maintaining physical servers.
Most importantly, ICWC’s private virtual office environment remains scalable and flexible, so they are ready and able to quickly set up operations should they open another office location. As a rapidly growing organization with many different locations working together, Abacus Private Cloud is a quick and responsive environment that remains customizable and reliable. Today, ICWC can focus on their business, instead of IT headaches. With operations running so smoothly, each location no longer spends time addressing problems, and attends to what’s really important: the health and success of the business.