St. Mary Church of Elgin
Catholic Church Campus with full Site-to-Site VPN Integration
When a mutual contact initiated the connection between St. Mary’s of Elgin and FireLogic, it was clear that there was a lot our company could bring to the table. The church has a campus with 5 distinct buildings that, prior to our involvement, were all completely segregated with disparate technology and network stacks. The parish office, school, Spanish Ministry, church, and rectory all siloed IT systems that had previously been managed by a one-person IT shop. After ongoing struggles that had no resolution in sight, St. Mary’s staff decided they needed a second opinion on how to bring about structured change.
After a campus-wide audit, FireLogic and St. Mary’s agreed that there were several large projects needed to modernize its IT landscape. We worked to prioritize projects with a focus on the areas of greatest need: the campus network, servers, email, security cameras, and a proper Disaster Recovery & Backup plan. The diverse staff needs in the different areas of campus made it obvious that any plan developed had to provide specialized focus for each user group.
Over the course of several years, FireLogic technicians would be involved with every facet of St. Mary’s technology baseline. The first step was connecting each building with a Meraki site-to-site VPN. Our on-site team then replaced a majority of the network hardware in the school to provide improved productivity for teachers and students alike. A brand-new Dell server was installed in the parish office and configured with FireLogic’s internal Cloud Backup software platform. Our staff completely overhauled the student computer lab to improve usability and performance by implementing a cloud-hosted server with thin client endpoint devices. Security cameras were installed in critical school locations to monitor student safety at all times.
Project Goals:
St Mary’s in Elgin is a Catholic Church campus that operates numerous wings spanning K-8 education classrooms, a rectory, and a business office. In addition to multiple property sites that need interconnected networking, a diverse user base relies on a mix of endpoint computing devices and a campus-wide WiFi infrastructure. Numerous aspects of this IT backbone needed attention, as well as someone they could turn to for Managed IT Support going forward.
Vertical:
- Non-profit
- Education
Solutions Involved:
- Hosted Email
- Server Infrastructure
- Managed IT Support
- Security
- Network Infrastructure
- Mobile Computing
- Disaster Recovery & Backup
- Virtualization
- Remote & Onsite IT Support
