A local transit authority and provider of public transportation needed online capabilities to manage their routes, riders, and inventory. In addition, their eCommerce and shopping cart capabilities needed to integrate with their transportation platform. M&S Consulting was able to help meet their needs through Salesforce, by customizing a solution specifically for their needs. Drivers now have a tablet mounted by their seat to access a Salesforce instance containing route and rider information. This enables drivers to be aware of the passengers riding their buses, including their booking reservations, pickup points, special seat arrangements, and, importantly, when they enter and exit … Read More
Managing a Complex Migration to Oracle Cloud
A publicly-traded company dealing with health information planned to migrate their primary business application suite to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), including Fusion Middleware components (SOA, IdAM, EDQ). The initial challenge was the number of interconnections between applications (over 70), each with complex security requirements. If the various components of the migration were not carefully timed and coordinated, the availability of critical business functions could be affected. To make it more challenging, the migration needed to be transparent to the business owners and thousands of users, with minimal downtime during cutover. Our combined team, in close collaboration with the customer, performed … Read More
University Leverages Free Cloud POC to Demonstrate Geographical Redundancy
A mid-sized public university, like many others, used their own on-prem data center for all data storage and backups. They were familiar with the flexibility that the cloud would provide, but they were hesitant to take the leap. They needed a solid business case and a way to ensure it would work in their environment. A series of events caused them to reevaluate their disaster recovery plan, which led them to quickly conclude that they needed additional capacity as well as geographical redundancy. The cloud seemed ideally suited to their needs, but they still needed to ensure it would work … Read More
VPN Upgrade Reduces Hospital’s Hassle
The healthcare division of a Fortune 500 company provides data processing services to its hospital clients. They use an IPsec VPN to transport data between the client and their cloud-hosted web application platform. Security and HIPAA compliance are obviously very important. Originally, our client used the VPN offered by the cloud service provider, but they were concerned about limitations in traffic visibility and the inability to locally initiate a tunnel. The final straw came when a new hospital client required the use of Internet Key Exchange v2 (IKEv2) protocol. Our team was able to use an open-source solution to replace … Read More
Business Intelligence Hampered by a Lack of Clear Role Management
A top 70 national university uses an enterprise-level solution to report on important university-wide research data and business intelligence. Access to this data is managed by roles across a multitude of schools within the university, but the lack of role management across the university was limiting access and use. To complicate things, the various stakeholders were initially reluctant to adopt a university-wide role framework or standard policy for provisioning and de-provisioning. In short: identity and access management (IAM) were inefficient and disjointed. Our team developed and implemented a phased approach to implement role-based access control (RBAC) framework to upgrade its … Read More
Big Challenges Facing Higher Education IT Administrators for 2020-2021
Watch the video of M&S Director of Higher Education, Kate Hazen, addressing some of the big challenges facing Higher Education IT Administrators in the coming year. Contact us to discuss how we can help you meet these challenges. – Video transcript – With the increased pressure on higher education along with diminishing budgets, higher education IT organizations are faced with some difficult decisions in regard to where to focus valuable time and resources. I believe three key areas should be addressed: Number One, there should be an increased emphasis on training and support for faculty and students in online technology … Read More
Cloud POC Demonstrates value to government agency
A large government organization intended to use Oracle User Productivity Kit to create and publish training material. Unfortunately, the original procurement did not obtain the necessary hardware resources. After collecting requirements and working with cloud providers, our team was able to obtain operating credits for a proof of concept (POC) that would enable all required functionality and security. The POC was also able to deliver additional functionality, including single sign-on, virtual desktop infrastructure, and shared storage. We were able to demonstrate not only the effectiveness of a cloud architecture but also the reduction in implementation and maintenance costs. If you’d … Read More
Thank you for joining the 2020 work-from-home experiment (whether you wanted to or not)
You already know the situation we’re in: we have all been plunged into the world’s largest work-from-home (WFH) experiment with very little time to adapt. This grand experiment has changed the rules for almost every working situation. Workers and companies that already had the ability for effective remote work are finding new challenges, now that seemingly everyone has joined the party. We have been refining the way our company works remotely since we began in 2002. Knowing how to get started, what’s important, and having the ability to reduce friction for your workforce will help you navigate through this time … Read More