How Engine Room’s Website Maintenance Service Identified Critical Server Failures

 

Skilled information technology support is integral to operating your business efficiently and securely. IT departments are invaluable in handling a company’s day-to-day technology, productivity, and security needs. But when new or large scale projects come around, it can be hard to juggle these additional IT demands with already full plates. That’s where partnering with Engine Room can help. Our team is experienced in collaborating with in-house IT teams to provide support and alleviate the workload during times of growth or transition.

In this case study, we highlight a project where Engine Room partnered with a client’s IT department to help tackle multiple issues at once. As a global manufacturing company, this client’s information technology team is responsible for maintaining its vast IT infrastructure. Engine Room worked in tandem with the in-house IT team to address multiple issues and efficiently relieve the burden of having many simultaneous website maintenance tasks.

The client’s IT team has many responsibilities beyond upgrading and securing the migrated websites. With so many migrations happening over a short period of time, the tasks would have been overwhelming for a single team with a multitude of other IT priorities. This was an opportunity for Engine Room to show our prowess in the applicable areas of IT, as well as project management and quality assurance, to keep everything on track. Below are the key supports and skills that Engine Room offered to help this client reach their company and IT goals.

Supporting Server Maintenance

Although Engine Room does not primarily maintain servers, our experts have the skills and experience necessary to support our clients’ computer networks and technology architecture. In this case, we used our knowledge of the Windows operating system and specifically IIS web server technology to address several server maintenance issues. Engine Room was able to utilize our web platform technology skills and insights to support our client and their IT professionals in seamlessly and efficiently analyzing, updating, and monitoring their servers.

Managing Software Updates

As typical with many growing companies, this global manufacturing company migrated applications and added new software as a result of multiple business acquisitions, which caused their IT needs to quickly evolve. At the time of this collaboration, all of their migrated technologies required upgrades, security patches, and other fixes. Engine Room collaborated with their IT department to identify and perform required platform upgrades to the .NET Framework and .NET Core. This process also required untangling and managing the many NuGet package dependencies and other code updates involved with the server platform refresh.

Walking through this multifaceted upgrade process also allowed Engine Room to identify technology redundancies and provide recommendations for removing unnecessary software. Making these improvements provided the client with both immediate and long-term benefits by improving security and easing future server maintenance requirements. Additionally, all of the sites went through Engine Room’s thorough quality assurance process to identify and address any bugs before going live.

Providing Comprehensive Outage Monitoring

Engine Room also provided comprehensive and proactive outage monitoring to avoid or quickly correct website downtime. With this monitoring in place, our team was able to support the client IT department in:

• Monitoring all web-based applications
• Tracking outage trends
• Investigating outage causes
• Looking out for SSL certificate expirations

Our team also provided ongoing analysis of page speed trends to help anticipate any problems before they lead to an outage. Beyond outage concerns, maintaining optimal page speeds has the added benefit of maximizing user experience and SEO rankings.

As mentioned above, managing a server and the entire IT infrastructure for a major global company is a heavy task for any IT department. Engine Room’s role in minimizing downtime and outage risks helped reduce the potential for issues to arise while client IT was busy tackling other priorities.

Remediating Security Vulnerabilities

Securing online applications and servers is a top priority for Engine Room and our clients in this era of global online information. In this particular case, the client experienced a production server outage due to a .NET site that had not been properly updated. Engine Room worked with the client outside of normal business hours to address this urgent concern.

Our team worked diligently to analyze and identify potential security threats and opportunities for platform upgrades. After applying our upgrade recommendations, we were ultimately able to get the sites back up and running with much greater security and stability. A schedule for regular ongoing IT updates to support website maintenance was also collaboratively developed and put into place, as well as an Incident Response Plan for dealing with any future outages.

To further enhance security, Engine Room was asked to assist with setting up a Cloudflare Web Application Firewall (WAF). This WAF works to protect IT servers and applications from abuse by using rulesets to filter unwanted or threatening web traffic. This technology simultaneously provides robust DNS routing and load balancing with Microsoft Azure resources while minimizing the chances of future outages, especially from DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks and others related to platform vulnerabilities.

Establishing Trust with Our IT Partners

Building a trusting relationship with our IT partners was foundational to this collaboration’s success. It can be a tricky partnership to navigate. As an external IT vendor (e.g., Engine Room) comes in to work with a client’s internal IT department, it’s easy to view the outside IT team as invasive, critical, or even a security risk. From the very beginning, the Engine Room team worked hard to gain their confidence and present themselves as trusted collaborators rather than competitors.

The client’s IT department also found that having the backing and support of a capable, outside IT vendor helps their internal team gain the trust of the company’s leadership. As a result, partnering with Engine Room made them feel like they had back-up in handling large-scale issues while looking good in the eyes of others within the company.

As we worked through several delicate IT tasks and assisted with outage and security vulnerabilities, the client IT team gained confidence in our work and ultimately came to view Engine Room as a valuable partner. We continue to have an excellent working relationship and remain in frequent contact, updating each other via email and video conferencing.

Collaborative Server Maintenance Is a Win for Everyone

This case study highlights some of the unique roles and services Engine Room can fulfill and provide. Partnering with this global manufacturing company required us to adapt our technological expertise to fit the unique needs of the client while also requiring a direct partnership with their internal IT department. Acting as an external IT vendor coming in to address major software updates, website maintenance, and security goals highlighted our expertise not only as digital architects but as client-centered collaborators.

IT consultation services aren’t just for clients without an internal IT team. Whether large, small, or nonexistent, Engine Room can support your IT team and digital platform needs. To learn more about what our team can do for you, talk with one of our experts today.