About IDI Group

IDI Group Companies (originally known as International Developers, Inc.) is an award-winning realty developer. They are greatly involved in developing condominiums (one of them being Watermark Condominium that was named Best Boutique Condominium Community in the entire Baltimore-Washington region), along with mixed-use properties, single-family homes, and thousands of acres of lands for residential constructions in the Washington metro region, Virginia, and Maryland.

Customer Issues

When Ciracom Cloud onboarded IDI Group, the organization’s computers were set up as a workgroup; this is less secure than having a domain setup, due to the lack of centralized control. Pushing a policy and making changes to these computers requires a great deal of time and effort as well, which is not very cost-efficient.

Solutions

Ciracom Cloud architected and implemented the following solutions to resolves issues raised by IDI Group:

• Shifted IDI Group’s computers from a workgroup network into domain and then later on migrated into the cloud, to easily push policies and for better collaborative and data-sharing experience
• Implemented Spanning for Microsoft 365, Cisco Umbrella, Webroot Cybersecurity, an antivirus solution, and Kaseya VSA, a remote monitoring management solution

Migrate IDI Group from a workgroup into a domain environment to easily push policies and for better collaborative and data-sharing experience

IDI Group had previously been working in a workgroup environment rather than a more-preferable domain environment for business networks, before Ciracom Cloud. In a workgroup setting, computers are set up as devices in home networks, wherein there’s no centralized control and they are working totally independent from each other. Domain, on the other hand, has a server with all centralized information and can easily be managed and controlled from another centralized device.

Moreover, data-sharing had been quite a challenge in the workgroup setup because since there was no centralized data, everyone had their own version of a single document; if they needed to collaborate on said document, back-and-forth edits and extra emails were needed to make that happen, which requires tons of extra time and effort. Having a domain environment, on the other hand, made collaboration easier. And since there was a central entity to all computers in the office that stored and managed all files, staff can easily access, retrieve, and collaborate on a document they want to work on.

With these actions taken, Ciracom Cloud transformed IDI Group’s environment from a workgroup into one with a more streamlined domain. A new server was established, and different pieces of software were strategically deployed to create a centralized space so users could store and share documents far more efficiently. On top of that, pushing policies and changes onto every computer has now significantly become less time-consuming since it only needs to be pushed to the central server rather than thirty-two individual computers (if it were still to be done in a workgroup setup). Eventually, when Microsoft came up with cloud solutions such as OneDrive and SharePoint, the on-premises central server was then migrated all into the cloud.

Implement spanning for Microsoft 365, Cisco Umbrella, Webroot Cybersecurity (antivirus solution), and Kaseya VSA (remote monitoring management solution)

Ciracom Cloud implemented Spanning Backup for Microsoft 365; Cisco Umbrella: a cloud security solution that blocks all malicious activities through whitelisting, content filtering, and further blocking known bad sites; Webroot Cybersecurity: an antivirus solution; and Kaseya VSA: a remote monitoring management solution for IDI Group. Spanning is deployed to back up Microsoft 365 products; this includes email, OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint. With Spanning in place, if something happens with IDI Group’s Microsoft tenant and data centers somehow all vanished, all data is guaranteed safe and protected. Webroot Cybersecurity on the other hand is an antivirus solution that acts as a shield to protect their local computer network.

Outcomes/Impact