Syskit Point helped The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority adopt M365 as a safe solution

Central Texas case study
Customer
The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority is a state agency tasked with maintaining toll roads in the Central Texas region.
Challenge
Controlling the security of their M365 environment with more than 300 external collaborators.
Solution
Syskit Point’s access reporting and management across sites from a central interface.
Results
Adopting the cost-efficient Microsoft 365 cloud while gaining tight control over the security of access and data.

Customer

Cory Bluhm is a team manager for The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, a state agency tasked with maintaining toll roads in the Central Texas region.

Cory Bluhm The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority

Cory was brought on primarily to manage the SharePoint and Office 365 environment and the hardware infrastructure within the organization. His primary task is to assist with all the toll road software management, ensuring that their contractors taking roadside tolls or capturing transactions get the information on time.

The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority was created by the Texas government tasked with implementing roadway projects funded through private funding bonds. Austin (Texas) is a very outdoor community, so the company builds a lot of community enhancement activities alongside road construction, including building parks, walking and bike trails, and other activities.

Challenge

As a government agency, the company used to keep things in-house and in a local server room and was skeptical about moving to the cloud.

Controlling the security of access for more than 30 users and 300 external collaborators

When their engineering department needed to share large datasets with external users, it was pretty clear that they should migrate to the Microsoft 365 environment. The first problem they encountered was that they needed to convince their finance and legal department it was a good idea.

Ensuring the security of the company’s M365 environment

The security of that kind of environment was another problem. Although a small state agency with about 30 employees, the company hires around 300 contractors who maintain, manage, and build roads. Each contractor and project has their own SharePoint site, so it isn’t a traditional environment. On top of that, users need to regularly share documents from their native Microsoft 365 site with their external contractors.

Cory needed to figure out who had access to what for each site individually in that complex environment. He and the other two admins required a lot of time throughout the week to do that, even just for one or two employee rotations. Since they work in a small agency, that time was precious.

They found that using native tools took a longer time when they’re trying to perform the same task or search for the same user on 20 or 30 different SharePoint sites. You have to go individually to each of those sites to get to a user. There wasn’t a quick way to go to one place and search for a user and remove them from all sites.

Solution

Cory and the team reached out to their external consultants, who gave them the name of a couple of vendors. They looked at a few demos and found Syskit Point’s features easy to use. Other software either looked more cumbersome or required a local server load to get things going. So, Cory and his team settled quickly on using Point instead of the other options.

“It kind of pulls all your tools into one nice interface. You don’t have to keep switching SharePoint sites to make things happen.”

Central access reporting and management across sites

They use the Permissions Matrix Report for regular permission auditing. They can quickly load the Permissions Matrix for a specific site to determine who has access to it. Also, they can go to the User Access report to see which sites and subfolders a specific user can access.

Cory’s team can export those reports quickly and send them to a contractor or the managers. They can then identify users who still need access to these locations and get back to Cory and his team to add them. That would have been a very difficult task for them to do using the native tools. However, it was a quick process in Syskit Point.

Results

Thanks to Syskit Point, Central Regional Mobility Authority adopted cost-efficient Microsoft 365 while controlling the security of access and data.


Resulting in:

  • 1.
    Improved security

    With Syskit Point, they know at any given point in time who has access to what, and after the proper actions, they can rest assured that the right people have the right access. Both internal and external users.

  • 2.
    Better adoption

    It encouraged end-users to be confident in the information they're getting from the IT department and colleagues responsible for the M365 environment. Before, they were using native tools, and it took them an hour or more to find the requested information. There were times when they might not even complete the search. Now that they’re using Syskit Point, they all have more trust in the system which helped them drive the adoption of the M365 platform.

  • 3.
    Increased efficiency

    Most of the contractors and internal users are not full-time certified SharePoint users, so they used Point to help streamline all the SharePoint activities in one place, making it easy to use. They simplified the process of user management and activity tracking for admins. Because they have been able to turn around things so quickly using Point, they accepted that the cloud solution is a good working solution for their documents and data.

  • 4.
    Reduced costs

    Syskit Point reduced the company's operational and hardware costs. If they didn't adopt Office 365 and SharePoint, they would have spent a lot of money buying servers, data backup systems, and cyber security protection. It also reduced IT employment costs and end-user delays because it allowed them to quickly get to the information they're looking for.

The time spent doing other important work will easily pay for itself in the cost of this product.

Cory Bluhm, Team manager for The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority