THE
FRONT
RANGE
Over 50,000 people move to the Mile High City every year
Denver’s explosive population growth has led to the creation of thousands of property management firms in the metro area managing over 300,000 renter-occupied households. These firms range from “mom and pop” landlords with a few doors to the company name all the way to conglomerates with thousands of units under management.
These firms handle sensitive tenant information, payment processing, background checks, and maintenance operations every single day.
Many have no idea how vulnerable their business is to disaster until it’s too late.
Client
Measner Building Contractors
Year
2019
Working with MBC’s key stakeholders from the management and accounting teams, we laid out three core goals for an overhaul of the company’s infrastructure and the feet-first jump into a unified service offering:
Security
MBC’s existing systems frequently required no multi-factor authentication, had no set patch management, and no form of IAM. Communications were handled entirely on personal phones with consumer free-tier email accounts.
Microsoft Entra ID brought the company’s lacking IAM up to speed, while the migration of company devices to Microsoft Intune allowed for unified patch management, compliance enforcement, and configuration.
Company emails were migrated to Exchange Online with Defender for Office 365 and company data was migrated to OneDrive and SharePoint, allowing us to implement controls to prevent unauthorized data exfiltration or the unencrypted transmission of sensitive tenant information.
Redundancy
The infrastructure at MBC was designed to fill company needs quickly as it grew, but as a result had little to no redundancy in the event of a crisis or data loss event. Data stored in single-copy on local workstations was virtually unprotected from cryptolockers, malware, and device failure.
Company leadership acknowledged this was an issue, but expressed valid concerns about implementation costs and complexity.
Thankfully, the built-in backup and version control features of OneDrive and SharePoint were able to fulfill the need for one primary data backup option in the cloud, with an additional offsite backup configured for essential staff computers.
Efficiency
The order of the day for MBC’s workstations was, in a word, “slow”.
Some computers used for operations-critical data such as tenant posting schedules and maintenance requests were 7 to 10 years old, and performed poorly enough that 30-60 second waits for basic tasks such as opening a web browser were accepted.
Beginning with a migration to business-class fiber Internet at one of the company’s three main locations, the company network was overhauled first, followed by the migration of each user to a proper business-class Dell OptiPlex, Latitude, or HP Zbook workstation.
Management’s goal?
If it’s holding our employees back, it’s out