Partner SucceSS

Vitality consulting Services Ltd. Providing Standardization, Simplicity, and confidence for Small Businesses

Since 2007, Vitality Consulting Services Ltd. has been providing best practice IT solutions for small businesses in the London and Cambridge, England area. Symantec is the company’s exclusive vendor at the Silver Partner level for end-point protection, backup, and hosted email security. The relationship contributed to 33 percent growth in the firm’s third year, despite the challenging economy.

a guarantee rooted in confidence

Chances are, very few people have ever used the words “IT infrastructure” and “reality television program” in the same sentence. Then there’s George Ilko, Vitality Consulting’s chief technology officer. When Vitality’s client ECSEC, one of the UK’s leading restaurant and bar, retail shop, and commercial office outfitters, was chosen to build the restaurant featured in the popular British TV series “Hell’s Kitchen,” infrastructure and entertainment converged. And when disaster struck ECSEC, Vitality Consulting was there to help.

“The evening before the restaurant was due to go live, their server fell over,” Ilko recalls. “It had all the drawings, all the plans, all of the communications, all of the email for the project. Their ac-countant was doing year-end. It just couldn’t have happened at a worse time. With our traditional backup product, we would have had to go to tape, find similar hardware, load all the drivers, build an image, and then deploy the backup, which would’ve taken maybe two or three days. They didn’t have that time.”

With Symantec Backup Exec™ System Recovery, Vitality was able to do a restore in 20 minutes and had ECSEC back up and running on new hardware. “It really got them out of trouble, and like the best IT, nobody knows you’ve even done it,” Ilko adds. “It just works in the background.”

Vitality uses Symantec products and solutions to ensure clients like ECSEC that their IT infrastruc-ture is continuously available, their data is safe, and that they are getting best in class solutions even on a small business budget. In fact, the firm puts its money where its mouth is: if Vitality sets up a client’s infrastructure and it fails for any reason, Vitality will get it back up and operational again at its own expense.

Partner PrOFILe

Website: www.vchq.co.uk

Headquarters: London and Cambridge, United Kingdom

Geographic area Served: London and Cambridge area, United Kingdom

Serves company Size: Small Business

Status: Registered

Symantec Solution Focus: Endpoint Security, Data Protection, and Web Security

Partner SucceSS VItaLIty cOnSuLtInG SerVIceS Ltd.

This kind of guarantee, and the confidence it instills, has helped the company grow steadi-ly in the 1-100 user market it serves, with strong client bases in professional services and the legal and finance sectors, among others. New business comes primarily through referrals, driven by Vitality’s man-aged services business model and reputation backed by market-leading security, backup, and hosted email solutions from Symantec.

a “whole provider” approach

New clients typically engage Vitality Consult-ing when they’re not happy with their net-work’s performance or their existing IT pro-vider. “Their network could be slow, they’re getting spam, their disks are getting full, and they want to see proof that their backups are working,” Ilko explains. “And they need to know they’re properly protected, just like a large business.”

Vitality performs a comprehensive system audit and then takes a “whole provider” ap-proach to standardize the client’s infrastruc-ture using best-in-class hardware and software solutions based not just on its own opinion, but on industry opinion. Symantec’s integrated solutions give Vitality the tools to address the spectrum of technology challenges its clients are facing.

“As a small business IT provider, our clients are diverse, but we just have to choose a partner that enables us to go into every solu-tion area for our clients,” Ilko says. “One of our key selling points is we go in with the best products in the marketplace, and typically they are Symantec products.”

Take, for instance, the Symantec™ Protection Suite Small Business Edition, an all-in-one suite that combines endpoint security, mes-saging security, and backup and recovery specifically for small businesses. An upgrade to the antivirus and firewall protection of-fered by Symantec™ Endpoint Protection 11.0—also a mainstay of Vitality’s managed services offering—Symantec Protection Suite provides additional security against malware and spam threats and rapidly recovers clients’ data or computer systems.

“Symantec Endpoint Protection is fantastic,” Ilko says. “We can use it for pretty much ev-erything our clients ask for, from locking down an application to Web filtering, all out of the box. The reason we like Symantec Pro-tection Suite is for the premium anti-spam capabilities, the automated threat-driven backups and quick restores, and because, much like us, it’s a one-stop shop.”

VItaLIty cOnSuLtInG SucceSS Summary

Key Industries

Construction

Financial,

Insurance

Real Estate

Manufacturing

Public Administration

Retail Trade

Services

Transport

Public Utilities

Wholesale Trade

Other

Services Provided

Management Consulting

Business Process Management

IT Consulting

IT Implementation

Operations Management

Outsourcing

technical accreditations

STS Endpoint Protection 11

SME Specialization (First in Europe)

15 SSE certifications

Symantec Products

Symantec™ Endpoint Protection

Symantec™ Protection Suite Small Business Edition

Symantec Backup Exec™

Symantec Backup Exec™ System Recovery

MessageLabs™ Hosted Email Security, a Symantec Hosted Service

For more information on Vitality Consulting Services and other success stories, please go to www.symantec.com/customersuccess.

“Symantec Backup Exec System

Recovery really got our client out

of trouble, and like the best IT,

nobody knows you’ve even done it.

It just works in the background.”

George Ilko

Chief Technology Officer

Vitality Consulting Services Ltd.

Opening doors with Backup exec System recovery 2010

The technology challenge that new clients face in the area of data protection can be summed up in one word: backup. “When we take on new clients, especially in this current environment, everyone is jittery about their data,” Ilko observes. “Financial institutions, even though they’re a small business, are regulated and have to make sure they’ve got an offsite backup of their entire infrastruc-ture and retain their data for six years.” Ilko notes that small business owners typically back up their small business server to tape, which means someone has to be responsible for changing the tape every day, “and you’re in trouble if something happens,” he adds.

Symantec Backup Exec™ 2010 and Symantec Backup Exec™ System Recovery 2010 solve these vexing problems and deliver added value along the way. “For continuous disk-to-disk-to-tape backup and recovery, we go for the gold standard, which is Symantec Backup Exec,” Ilko explains. “We might apply a tiered storage model that’s typically associated with the enterprise but on a small business budget.”

Better yet, says Ilko, the business owner can forget about the worry of having to drive to the office to change the tape every day. “I mean, how crazy is that? We can go in with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010, automate a scheduled daily backup, create a snapshot, and then FTP that offsite to our infrastructure here at Vitality. We get a report telling us the backup was successful and can do test restores in 20 minutes, which enables the client to have both onsite backup and an offsite business continuity solution. I don’t know many solutions out there for small business that can provide that type of functionality.”

Vitality Consulting itself benefits from the new deduplication and virtualization capa-bilities in Symantec Backup Exec 2010. “Because we restore backup images onto our infrastructure for a large number of clients, the deduplication functionality means that we only keep the data once,” Ilko notes. “As a result, our storage infrastructure and as-sociated utility costs shrink, which enables us to be very competitive financially.”

The virtualization capability in Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 2010 enables Vitality to take images from different ven-dors, whether it’s a Hyper-V, Citrix, or VM-ware infrastructure, and standardize that onto the company’s infrastructure. “We now carry one system recovery disk around to all of our clients, and it pretty much recognizes any server,” Ilko explains. “We can restore an entire server to dissimilar hardware within 20 minutes. We can also do that for desktops and laptops with the Symantec Backup Exec™ System Recovery Desktop Edition included in the multi-tier Symantec Protection Suite. So we’ve got that infrastructure on a small busi-ness budget, which I think is unbeatable.”

Stopping spam dead

Symantec is Vitality Consulting’s only vendor for hosted mail security, and the firm both uses and sells MessageLabs™ Hosted Email Security. “Spam can be a huge problem for small business, especially if that business provides professional services such as an accountancy practice or solicitors that bill by the hour or by 15 minute sectors,” Ilko says. “If they spend half an hour each morning cleaning out the spam in their inboxes, they can’t bill for that time.”

MessageLabs Hosted Email Security blocks spam email (along with any embedded vi-ruses) that would otherwise consume disk space and expensive bandwidth, thereby helping both Vitality and its clients make ef-ficient use of local internet connections while improving staff productivity.

Partner SucceSS VItaLIty cOnSuLtInG SerVIceS Ltd.

“The reason we like Symantec

Protection Suite is for the premium

anti-spam capabilities, the automated

threat-driven backups and quick

restores, and because, much

like us, it’s a one-stop shop.”

George Ilko

Chief Technology Officer

Vitality Consulting Services Ltd.

Partner SucceSS VItaLIty cOnSuLtInG SerVIceS Ltd.

Copyright © 2010 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec logo, Backup Exec, and MessageLabs are all trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the United States and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Symantec document #21017716

Integrated management solutions spell success

When a small accountancy business in Saw-ston, Cambridge decided to outsource its IT operations to Vitality, the firm was having performance issues with incumbent products and problems with spam. “The business owner came to us and said, this is driving us mad. We’re missing billable hours here, be-cause of our infrastructure,” Ilko recalls.

Vitality replaced the legacy McAfee antivirus product with Symantec Endpoint Protection, chosen because it was the leader in the VB100 [Virus Bulletin] awards. “We intro-duced a threat-driven backup,” Ilko contin-ues. “We introduced mail security for Ex-change, and their spam problems stopped overnight, which they thanked us for. We in-troduced the offsite backup capabilities of Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, which meant that the business owner, didn’t have to come in every day to change the tape over. We consolidated the infrastructure with one vendor and one central console with Symantec Protection Suite.”

As a result of this transformation, the cus-tomers’ revenues have increased, they’ve taken on more employees, and they’re buying a new building. “They’re really moving for-ward now with confidence in their infrastruc-ture as a tool they can call on to make money,” Ilko observes. “That’s why they’re in busi-ness, really.”

Knowledge plus partnership equals value

As part of its partnership agreement with Symantec, Vitality obtained and in turn lever-aged 24-hour Enterprise Support Services from Symantec for its small business clients. In addition to the education resources avail-able through Symantec’s online partner portal, Vitality’s Silver Partner status also gave its staff the opportunity to participate in training courses provided to the engineers in Symantec’s UK offices in Reading and Green Park.

“That training experience, and the knowledge we’ve gained in the products, makes us a trusted advisor to our clients,” Ilko says. “On top of that, Symantec refers leads—organi-zations we would never get a foot into other-wise. If we learn the Symantec products properly, from the ground up, we have both the partner and the ability to go into every product area for our clients.”

Ilko emphasizes that Vitality didn’t take the decision lightly on its choice of partner. “We’re an independent consultancy,” he says. “We checked out everybody. We looked at Microsoft Forefront, McAfee, Cisco, Kasper-ski. We looked at the Virus Bulletin 100 awards and saw what’s the best product. We trialed products in house first, and then took them to our clients.”

Choosing the right partner has clearly paid off for Vitality Consulting. “The main thing we take away from our relationship with Symantec and with our clients is confidence,” Ilko concludes. “When a product does what it says it will do, the confidence we have in that product transmits to our clients. And ‘ask our clients’ is really the highest praise we can give to the partners we select.”

“As a small business IT provider, our

clients are diverse, but we just have

to choose a partner that enables

us to go into every solution area for

our clients. We go in with the best

products in the marketplace, and

typically they are Symantec products.”

George Ilko

Chief Technology Officer

Vitality Consulting Services Ltd.